The Licks Within The Lip (2023)

This solo show was presented at St. Luke’s Crypt, Cork City. It comprised of a painting installation, sound and moving image works informed by the ideas explored in W/w. The exhibition was commissioned by Bloomers, curated by Kim Crowley and funded by The Arts Council.

Seven Ways To Get Back

This painting installation employs the art historical idea of the grid to visually explore folklore as a form of gossip that has the ability to shape our perception and experience of space.

Each painting renders a landscape imbued with one of the seven items from Irish folklore believed to ward off faeries so that one could return home safely: salt, something holy, fire, running water, mud, something red and steel. The paintings are installed together and can be understood as a singular work that houses multiple and contradicting narratives.

Zarina Muhammad (The White Pube) comments on the painting installation’s relationship to the grid construct:

“If these paintings before you are arranged in a grid, then I think they hold a tension within them. Towards order; something that the irrational resists. And these paintings have the irrational at their centre, don’t they? Woman, Witch, magical mythological entity, folklore creature from the pagan past. And then consider Caliban, the native son held in chains, abject oppressed post colonial subject. THE SUBALTERN indeed! Because a grid is an attempt to assert order, system or hierarchy. But the irrational is liquid and sprawling.”

Gossip and The World – Zarina Muhammad (The White Pube)Exhibition Text

*Seven Ways To Get Back,* Painting installation, 2023. Photo: Celeste Burdon

Photo: John Beasley

This installation was selected for the Periodical Review 14—A Language To Shout In at Pallas Projects/Studios (2024)

The selector and curator Miguel Amado comments:

“Sarah Long is an Irish artist and writer whose practice spans painting, text and performance. Long focuses on suppressed female archetypes, nationhood and myth, and positions the body in the tradition of landscape to contest the historical male gaze. The installation Seven Ways to Get Back (2023) was included in the Long’s solo show at St. Luke’s Crypt, Cork, held last year. It consists of seven paintings, presented in a modular structure, that render a landscape imbued with the seven folkloric items believed to ward off faeries so that one may return home safely: salt, something holy, fire, running water, mud, something red, and steel. The artist is interested in embodying the patriarchal Mother Ireland literary figure, particularly Mother Ireland’s ability to house contrasting visions, and explores the potential for expanded thinking around the construct of the female condition.”