Biography
Susan Mannion is a full-time visual artist and curator originally from Omagh, working from Boyle in the west of Ireland and exhibiting on a circuit that spans the Royal Academy (RA), the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), and the Royal Ulster Academy (RUA). Her primary practice is wood engraving and copper enamelling, with lino, woodcut, and mokuhanga (Japanese water-based woodblock printing) running as parallel strands. She holds a BSc, an MSSc, and a PhD together with various certificates and diplomas, and her academic background is in archaeology — specifically the medieval architecture of the Cistercian and Friary orders of Connacht — a subject that informs the architectural-form motifs recurring through her enamel and wood-engraving series.
Mannion has been a member of Graphic Studio Dublin since 2012 and studied mokuhanga in Japan at MI-Lab, the Mokuhanga Innovation Laboratory at Lake Kawaguchi and an internationally recognised centre for the discipline. Her residencies and awards have included The Dock, Cill Rialaig, the Valerie Earley Award, the Tyrone Guthrie Residency Award, and the six-week MI-Lab mokuhanga residency in Japan. She is a former museum curator for Mayo County Council and Craigavon Borough Council and a former teaching assistant at Queen's University, Belfast.
Her mokuhanga 'Transition' was selected for Kanreki, the exhibition mounted by Graphic Studio Dublin to mark its 60th anniversary, for which all participating artists incorporated the colour red into their prints. The exhibition was shown at The Model, Sligo, and at Graphic Studio Gallery, Dublin, in 2021. Other mokuhanga works in her catalogue include 'The White Pebble', 'The Days Mount Up', and 'Creativity Waxes and Wanes'.
Mannion's broader body of work runs across wood engraving (the Lacunae cycle, together with 'Summer Rain' and 'Frost Line'), screened-and-sifted enamel on copper (the Architectural Form series), and archival digital mixed-media print ('The Black Pool — Dublin Lives Reflected'). Her work draws on landscape and the patterns of nature, building a sense of place, time, and memory through intricate thread-like lines and fine textural incisions to produce an atmospheric, surreal aesthetic. Collaborations with musicians, poets, and writers have produced album covers and book illustrations, part of an established cross-medium practice that combines wood engraving, mokuhanga, and copper enamel.
Key Facts
- Nationality
- 🇮🇪Ireland
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Works Indexed
- 2
Frequently Asked Questions
Susan Mannion is a full-time visual artist and curator originally from Omagh, working from Boyle in the west of Ireland and exhibiting on a circuit that spans the Royal Academy (RA), the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), and the Royal Ulster Academy (RUA). Her primary practice is wood engraving and copper enamelling, with lino, woodcut, and mokuhanga (Japanese water-based woodblock printing) running as parallel strands. She holds a BSc, an MSSc, and a PhD together with various certificates and diplomas, and her academic background is in archaeology — specifically the medieval architecture of the Cistercian and Friary orders of Connacht — a subject that informs the architectural-form motifs recurring through her enamel and wood-engraving series.
Susan Mannion's work was shaped by the Contemporary Mokuhanga tradition in Japanese woodblock printmaking. Contemporary Mokuhanga: Contemporary mokuhanga (literally "wood-block print") encompasses artists working from approximately 1970 to the present who continue or reinvent traditional Japanese woodblock printing techniques.
