Susan Early

Susan Early (born 1967, Dublin) is an Irish architect and printmaker whose intaglio practice records the urban and coastal landscape of Ireland. She has been a member of Graphic Studio Dublin since 2012, where for several years she also served as Studio Administrator, and she works in copper-plate etching, aquatint, drypoint, linocut, and Japanese water-based woodblock (mokuhanga).

Early's professional formation as an architect — she took a B.Arch. at University College Dublin and practised architecture in Dublin before turning fully to printmaking — informs her print sensibility throughout. Her recurring subject is the structured edge between built form and the moving sea: lighthouses such as the Baily and the Fastnet, the Martello towers of the Dublin coast, the chimneys of Dublin Bay, and the towers and historic structures of the Dublin and Wicklow coastline. Her architectural training flows directly into the plates, some of which diagram a lighthouse or tower in technical-drawing convention rather than rendering it as a romantic image.

Early is also one of the active mokuhanga practitioners in the Graphic Studio Dublin community, producing Japanese woodblock prints alongside her etchings. Her mokuhanga work was included in the studio's Kanreki exhibition — the 60th-anniversary survey shown at The Model in Sligo and in Nara, Japan (2020–2021) — which brought Irish woodblock printmaking into dialogue with its Japanese source.

She works at a range of scales, from small coastal studies to large lighthouse etchings issued as diptychs and triptychs, with panoramic Dublin Bay views extending the same structural focus across a long horizontal format. Her prints are held in Irish public collections including the Office of Public Works, the National Library of Ireland, the University of Limerick, Fingal County Council, and the Northern Ireland Civil Service Collection.

Early has exhibited her work in Ireland, the United Kingdom, the rest of Europe, Canada, the United States, and Japan. She has shown regularly with the Dublin Painting and Sketching Club, in the Royal Hibernian Academy Annual Exhibitions, in the dlr Lexicon and other venues of the 60 Years of Graphic Studio Dublin survey, and in international print competitions including the 2025 Ironbridge Fine Art Printmaking Competition. Her practice represents one of the strongest contemporary intersections in Irish printmaking between architectural drawing and the intaglio plate.