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 is a member of Graphic Studio Dublin (since 2012), where she also serves as Studio Administrator, and works in copper-plate etching, aquatint, drypoint, sugarlift, linocut, and Japanese water-based woodblock (mokuhanga).

Early's professional formation as an architect — she trained as a registered architect in Ireland — informs her print sensibility throughout. Her recurring subject is the structured edge between built form and the moving sea: lighthouses (Baily, Fastnet, Howth, Hook Head, Bass Harbor in Maine, High Point on Cape Cod, The Nubble in Maine, Portland Headlight in Maine, Loop Head, Mullaghmore, Fanad Head, St. John's Point, Rotten Island, Blacksod), Martello towers (Seapoint, Sandycove, the Joycean Tower at Sandycove), the chimneys of Dublin Bay (Poolbeg, Ringsend), and the towers and historic structures of Dublin and the Wicklow coast (St. Patrick's Tower, Farmleigh Tower, Mountjoy Square, the Botanic Gardens Curvilinear Range and Palm House).

Her Fastnet Lighthouse and Martello Tower 'Plan, Section, Elevation' suite (2024) is among the most architecturally explicit recent prints in the Graphic Studio Gallery catalogue: each plate diagrams the lighthouse or tower in technical drawing convention rather than as a romantic image. The series demonstrates the way her architectural background flows directly into her plates. The smaller Dublin Bay panoramic etchings (50 × 8 cm horizontal format, editions of 50) at Dun Laoghaire, Seapoint, Coliemore, and across-Dublin-Bay views demonstrate the same structural focus at chamber scale.

Early is also one of the active mokuhanga practitioners in the Graphic Studio Dublin community, producing Japanese woodblock prints in editions of 5–10 such as Streedagh Beach Sligo, Baily Lighthouse Dublin, Sand Currents, and Red to Port. Her mokuhanga work was included in the studio's 'Kanreki' 60th-anniversary mokuhanga exhibition (2021) — the show that traced the transmission of the medium from Moya Bligh through to the current generation of Irish woodblock printmakers.

Her print catalogue at Graphic Studio Gallery currently exceeds seventy plates spanning 2014 to 2026. Notable larger plates include the 1.45 m diptych Baily to Dublin Bay (etching, edition of 15, €1,150), the Fastnet Lighthouse Triptych (78 × 48 cm, edition of 30, €890), the Strandhill (etching and aquatint), and the Maine and Cape Cod lighthouse trio that emerged from her American travel. Smaller-format works are issued in editions of 50 to 100.

Early has exhibited her work in Ireland, the United Kingdom, the rest of Europe, Canada, the United States, and Japan. Her prints are held in the Office of Public Works (OPW) Collection, the Northern Ireland Civil Service Collection, and other Irish public-building collections. She has shown at the Dublin Painting and Sketching Club, the Royal Hibernian Academy, the dlr Lexicon Kanreki survey, and at international print competitions including the 2025 Ironbridge Fine Arts Printmaking Competition. Her practice represents one of the strongest contemporary intersections in Irish printmaking between architectural drawing and the intaglio plate.