Louth artist dives into the depths of Carlingford Lough

Louth artist Suzanne Carroll opens Into the Aphotic — An Underworld at Droichead Arts Centre this September, a body of oil and encaustic paintings borrowing the ocean’s own term for total darkness to think through the depths of Carlingford Lough.

Carroll lives on Annaverna mountain, a twenty-minute drive from the lough itself — a stretch of water split down the middle by the border, part Republic, part North. That divide runs “quietly” through the whole show, alongside the paintings’ journey from light into total dark — tracking what happens to colour, form and life the further down you go.

A separate series of paintings is made using pigment ground from stone gathered on the lough’s foreshore.

Alongside the paintings, Carroll is presenting The Carlingford Lough Collection, an installation built like an archaeological dig table: objects gathered from the shoreline, catalogued and labelled as though for a museum collection — the labels themselves an experiment in AI-generated museum text.

A large wall piece runs alongside it — a 12ft by 8ft “artist’s notebook page” laying out Carroll’s own research process, including close studies of individual materials such as titanium white, cobalt blue and beeswax, showing how one find or question led to the next.

“The wall is where I think out loud — research, AI, books, podcasts, whatever I’m watching — all of it feeding in. Getting it down on paper is what lets my mind leap from one idea to the next, and I’m looking forward to sharing what’s come of it,” Suzanne said.

Carroll holds a First Class Honours BA in Fine Art with Critical Culture from NCAD (2021) and is a member of Bridge Street Studios in Dundalk and Louth CraftMark.

Into the Aphotic follows her exhibition The Fishery Exchange, developed out of a socially engaged project on marine conservation with oyster producers from both the north and south of the lough.

Into the Aphotic — An Underworld opens at Droichead Arts Centre, Drogheda, at 3pm on Saturday 12 September 2026, and runs until Saturday 24 October 2026