Home

Death and Dreams

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams (2025)

This radio play was commissioned by Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, Thrapston, Northampshire, United Kingdom (2025)

Part of this work was originally commissioned as a text for MAP Magazine (2023)

This work was selected for the group show At First/ I Was Land at Studio 12, Backwater Artists Group, Cork City (2025).

The curator Niamh Brown comments: “Long takes the allegory of Mother Ireland and rejects the reduction of the female form that has acted as a descriptor for national identity, culture and politics in Ireland. Through painting, text and moving image, Long takes an auto-fictionalised approach to contemporary female experiences and draws links to nature and mythology.”

In a text reflecting on the exhibition, Dawn Williams, comments : “Sarah Long’s floor-based video Tread softly because you tread on my dreams looks at land, albeit on a micro scale whilst addressing big thematics. Using a digital pen to draw the outline of each frond and leaf contained in a static image, she retells her dreams through her auto-fictional character, Mary – a present-day embodiment of the Mother Ireland figure. Punctuated by stories centred around men’s foibles, including those of Samuel Beckett, Michael Collins (NASA astronaut), and William Martin Murphy, whom, when she confronts the ‘feckin gombeen’ [who is stalking her around Cork City] tells her ‘to be a good girl and go about your day’. To underline the power of Irish patriarchy, below the image of the leaves and fronds, are distorted black and white moving images of Ireland’s key political figures including General Michael Collins. Long’s mesmeric continuous drawing combined with her monologue is as funny as it is serious, and whilst her drawing is strangely mediative, her narrative offers a meandering yet powerful reflection on society’s relationship with women, as Mary says: ‘I fear we are on a one-way march.., I feel we are just stuck…its incessant and it doesn’t seem to matter…it won’t stop because the ghosts still have their say.’ “

Death and Dreams (2024)

This radio play was broadcast on Radio Solstice (December, 2024).

Part of this work contains elements commissioned by Fermynwoods Contemporary Art.

This work formed part of ‘I will not flower’, a solo exhibition presented at South Tipperary Arts Centre (2025).