For the love of Mayo’s lakes

When we think of the portrayal of Co Mayo in landscape art, we often think of paintings of iconic scenes – renderings of Croagh Patrick in all its moods, of tumble-down cottages in humble fields, of our dramatic sea-carved coastline, with its necklace of soft, sandy beaches strung between stiff collars of cliffs.
However, our many lakes are just as evocative, just as inspiring. There are the large limestone lakes, such as Corrib, Mask, Conn, Cullin and Carra, and well-known beauties, like Doo Lough, Carrowmore Lake, Beltra, Lough Feagh and Lough Furnace. Then there are hidden gems – our countless corrie lakes, like Glenawough, Dirkbeg and Lough Nadirkmore at the foothills of the Party mountains, or the sprinkling on Achill’s Croaghaun Mountain. The lovely Urlaur Lakes in east Mayo have become a heavenly haven for the critically endangered European Eel – if you’re struggling to survive, you may as well pick a pretty spot.
But back to art. Casting our minds back, we might think of lake landscapes, such as ‘Cottages by a Bog Lake’, by Paul Henry, or ‘A County Mayo Lake’, by fellow mid-20th-century artist Flora H Mitchell.
More recently, Lough Carra – with its otherworldly marl glow and unique wildlife – has inspired Partry-based artist Deirdre Walsh, whose enchanting plein-air paintings beautifully capture its magic and ever-fleeting light. Cora Murphy’s Mayo Lakes Collection – created on the shores of Lough Carra and Lough Mask, where her family have fished for generations – contains stunningly textured meditations on lake water and lake scenes. Photographer Lynda Huxley has also spent years documenting Lough Carra.
Other less-well-known inland pockets of water are worthy of the creative eye too – as is proved by Mayo News columnist Michael Kingdon’s stunning photograph of Dirkbeg, taken last November. It deservedly won a recent landscape photography competition run by Mayo Books (check it out on their Facebook page).
Now a new collection of work is helping to expand this body of art that finds its muse in the county’s lakes. ‘Exploring the Lakes of Mayo’, by Annaliese Brown, opened last week at the Courtyard Gallery of the National Museum of Country Life, Turlough.
“This is an ongoing project to document and represent all the lakes in Co Mayo, to record their unique shapes and their place in our precious environment,” the artist explained.
“Ireland’s historically pristine lakes and rivers are under threat from pollution and climate change. The County of Mayo has at least 70 named lakes with unique shapes, which change over time with the rise and fall of the water levels, affected by tree planting, weather, changes to land use and urban development.”
Her work was born from a wish to explore and experiment with the shapes made by the lakes in the landscape, ‘as viewed from above’.
“l am consistently inspired by the nature and topography of my rural home place,” she says, “and in this work I use printing lino to carve the outline of the lakes and the tributary rivers, and sometimes adjoining roads and laneways. I then use the carved lino to make ceramic reliefs. The light and shadows made by the undulations and ridges in the clay fascinate me.
“The panels capture the lakes at a brief moment in their history momentarily halting their constant flux in shape and size.”
This chimes with the artist’s ongoing interest in ‘shape, line and light’. In her practice, she uses many different media – from collage and clay to ink and print – to ‘experiment with shape, shadow and texture’.
Indeed, Brown is also using the lake lino prints to create a second tranche of work that explores another side to Mayo – its old flax and linen industries.
“Research into the way lakes and waterways contributed to the lives and livelihoods of rural Mayo communities introduced me to flax growing and the making of linen,” she says, “and I have been printing with the lino-print lake shapes onto linen samples that I sourced from a linen mill in Belfast.”
A recent graduate of Contemporary Art Practice at the Atlantic Technological University, (formerly GMIT Castleabar), she previously studied fine art at West Surrey College of Art and Design in the UK. She was long-listed for the RDS Visual Art Awards 2022 and also received the Mary Lavelle Burke Bursary Award last year.
Her exhibition ‘Exploring the Lakes of Mayo’ will run at the Courtyard Gallery until the end of September. Like the bodies of water that have inspired it, it contains hidden depth and strikingly beautiful forms, and is certainly well worth a visit.

• The National Museum of Country Life, Turlough, is open Tuesday to Saturday, from 10am to 5pm, and Sundays and Mondays, from 1pm to 5pm.