Mullaghmore

An etching with aquatint of Mullaghmore, the small fishing village and harbor on the north Sligo coast, where a curved stone pier shelters a working anchorage beneath the silhouette of Classiebawn Castle on the headland behind. The combined intaglio technique gives Early two registers to work with: bitten line, drawn through the hard ground with a needle, for the harbor wall coursing, masts, and the architectural profile of the castle; and aquatint, in which a powdered resin ground is fused to the plate before staged acid bites, for the broad tonal fields of sky, sea, and shadowed quayside. The result tends toward a measured, architectural reading of place rather than a picturesque one, with attention paid to how the engineered edge of the pier meets the open water of Donegal Bay. Mullaghmore sits within Early's continuing record of the structured edges of the Irish coast, the same series of intaglio observations that includes Loop Head and Fanad Head, and reflects her training as a registered architect in Ireland.