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.”

Photo: John Beasley

Periodical Review 14—A Language To Shout In

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

In an essay on Paper Visual Art, Diana Bamimeke comments:

“Sarah Long’s paintings using folklore to intervene in the masculine histories that disempower women”

Photo: Serhii Shapoval

Night and Day Words Fell On Me

This expanded painting refers to the poem Mother Ireland by Eavan Boland.

Beat Time

This sound and moving image work meditates on ideas of Brownian motion and draws connections between micro and macro patterns found in nature.

The curator of  ‘The Licks Within The Lip’, Kim Crowley comments:

“Beat Time can be viewed as an alternative mapping of the terrain of a fixed space. The line acts as a declarative ‘I was here’ and a way of marking a presence within a fixed space. Animated line drawings move along hedgerows, marking consciousness, making many twists and turns touching on the idea that the activity of life itself is the state of being suspended in a medium.”

Photo: Celeste Burdon