Sandycove

An etching from 2017 of Sandycove, the small cove on the south Dublin Bay coast that holds the Martello tower now occupied by the James Joyce Museum and the adjoining Forty Foot bathing place. The likely subject is the squat granite drum of the tower set on its rocky promontory, with the cove's stepped bathing rocks and the bay opening northward toward Howth. Etching alone, without aquatint, places the burden of description on bitten line: hatched and cross-hatched courses approximate the granite masonry of the Napoleonic-era tower, while looser passages register the broken edges of the rocks and the surface of the water. Early's reading of the site is consistent with her wider practice — an architect's interest in a defensive structure repurposed by the city's bathing and literary cultures, drawn at the threshold where the built edge meets the sea. The print sits between her early Lissadell-period intaglios and the more weather-driven lighthouse subjects of Loop Head, Fanad Head, and Mullaghmore.