Exhibition at Studio 12, Backwater Artist Group, Cork City (2019)
‘Open space in Long’s paintings is anything but empty, with white canvas overrun by bands of delicate lines. Sometimes the line coalesce into weeds and flowers, like sketches in a naturalist’s notebook. More often they run freely..’
‘Working at the West Cork Arts Centre last year, on the exhibition ‘Coming Home: Art & the Great Hunger, Long has incorporated this history into her research, showing us how the landscape is ceaselessly written over. Through unsentimental shapes and lines, she renders the callousness – the hardening over – that characterises a landscape withstanding before, during and after famine. Testifying to this endurance, ‘I can recall’ – Long’s ‘lyric poem’, presented as a wall text and de facto epigraph to the show – speaks to centuries of changed witnessed by the natural world. It reads like the account of a long war, in which the lost are given the chance to tell their story beside the living paintings’
Frani O’ Toole, writer, excerpt from VAI Newsheet Nov/Dec issue 2019.
‘The power of Sarah Long’s images is matched in the thoughtful, exploratory writing that accompanies this exhibition.’
[The work]‘… a renewal of our understanding of Romantic Ireland, not as a past moment but rather a call for a new relationship with a confused and ever changing present’
– Professor Claire Connolly, Modern English, University College Cork (opening words).
Sarah Long | Artist 