Dreamlike worlds tinged with dark details are portrayed in Caroline Donohue's intricately made work at Draíocht, writes SARA KEATING

CAROLINE Donohue’s intricate etchings present the viewer with dreamlike worlds they can fall into. In her first solo exhibition at Draíocht First Floor Gallery, her exquisite prints layer a fairy-tale landscape with dark gothic details: the deep roots of old trees erupt through a Hansel and Gretel house; an emperor’s sedan chair suggests a coffin; a collector sits back-turned to us, his animal specimens pinned to the wall.

Although Donohue cites the famous fairy-tale illustrations of Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac and Harry Clarke as some of her primary inspirations, she sees her own work as meditative rather than illustrative. As she explains, the prints are suggestive rather than narrative-based: “I suppose I think of [my work] as the beginning of something; that the images are containers for the viewer to fill with their own stories, whatever it is that they see.”

Donohue graduated from NCAD in 2005, specialising in print-making. At her graduate show she came to the attention of the Graphic Studio Gallery, which offered her one of its prestigious Graduate Awards, which included a space at its purpose-built print-making studio at the old Findlater distilleries on the North Circular Road, Dublin.

Printmaking is notoriously labour-intensive and requires a variety of expensive equipment depending on the particular printing medium, and Donohue acknowledges how lucky she was to have had the studio’s patronage from the beginning.

Donohue works through the medium of aquatint: etching her exquisitely detailed designs with rosin onto copper plates which are then exposed to acid, creating the first layer of her final image.

The process is repeated several times before the plate is passed through the ink press with paper and the first edition appears. It is painstaking work, and Donohue works slowly herself, but in the six years since graduation, she has amassed an impressive body of 23 works, which have been collected together for the show at Draíocht.

Despite the complex technical demands, Donohue says that her favourite part of the whole printmaking process is the drawing; coming up with the original design.

“There is a slow, rhythmic, ritualistic process to it,” she explains, “scratching out your ideas on the plate with a pin.

"You can just lose yourself in the details," she continues, pointing out the tiny pulsing amoebic jewels that are entwined in the spider web of doomed romance in Little Snow White Feet, her print inspired by WB Yeats's poem Down by the Salley Gardens, and the different character of each individual bird in the eerie Reclaiming What Was Mine, in which an empty formal sitting room is engulfed by the natural world as a tree and its inhabitants erupt through the fireplace.

“I can just sit there drawing,” Donohue confesses, “and hours later realise how much the image has built and grown.”

This spawning of detail seems an apt metaphor both for the uncanny melancholic tone and the processes of the subconscious imagination that much of Donohue's work harnesses. That's not to say that Donohue's work is entirely defined by such gloomy evocations: Great Expectations– a small theatre interior that features a spotlight on an empty stage – is an especially playful work.

Most of Donohue’s etchings are framed by old-fashioned unpeopled spaces: archaic ballrooms, empty ruined theatres, rooms that suggest rotting grandeur. If Donohue’s imagination is fired by anything in particular, she says, it is “old cities and buildings, the furniture within them, and the sense of the familiar, that the sense of the past they carry with them evoke for me. But it is often an oppressive, overwhelming thing, this feeling, so I am always looking for the window, for the way out.”

The apertures, windows, glass boxes and proscenium frames in Donohue’s work provide that sense of imaginary release for the viewer of her work. As they gaze into her prints, they see beyond the exquisite immediate details, even, into suggestive elsewhere worlds.

Caroline Donohue, Recent Work runs at Draíocht, Blanchardstown, until February 21st, 2012.