Sarah Long | Artist
Death and Dreams, Radio Play, broadcast on Radio Solstice (forthcoming: December, 2024)
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams, Radio Play commissioned by Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, Thrapston, Northampshire, United Kingdom ( forthcoming: January, 2025)
W/w is a multi-dimensional, quasi-novella work of auto-fiction that spins out into the space of the world. W/w is concerned with how we navigate space, the politics of space, who gets to exist, where and when and why?
Confined to the porch during Lockdown, my endogenous protagonist Mary is searching for a new form, a larger space, to occupy. Mary is an autofictional character, an aspiring artist and writer, in conflict with the world around her. W/w follows her trials and triumphs as she struggles with the different spaces and boxes she finds herself in the past, present and future.
W/w was presented in various forms of installation from sound and moving image work to performance, drawing and publication at CCA Glasgow Intermedia Space, CCA Glasgow Theatre Space and Glasgow School of Art in 2022. The work was awarded the John Calcutt Critical Writing Prize 2022.
“Mary floats from space to space while confined to the porch of her family home during Lockdown. Mary declares ‘I WAS HERE’. Mary shrinks and expands as she bumps up against the corners of her reality. A feverish and compassionate expression of ARTIST/ female / g-i-r-l/ woman/ writer, Mary has all the feelings. Alone and in the porch, pouring over her painting practice while navigating the politics of space, Mary comes to the startling realisation that she is Mother Éire. A confabulation of life, she is a fecundity of existence. Her fierce voice scrambles and scratches to be heard. She exists as a complex personhood, in many, many forms. Mary echoes as a sound work that ricochets and floats lightly around the white walls of a gallery space. Mary is the squiggle of a line that moves from one point to another within the frame.
Mary likes to reach up high and graze her fingertips off the ceiling. Mary likes to spread her legs and envelop every feeling – Mary is here to stretch every curve on her b a c k. If she did not exist the world would keep on spinning, but she does.A bildungsroman a couple of years too late, a homecoming, when she’s never left home, a Künstlerroman in denial, a neurosis; W/w is a multi-dimensional, quasi-novella work of auto-fiction that spins out into the space of the world.”
PACKANATOMICALIZATION is a conversation between the artist Aikaterini Gegisian and the writer Sarah Long. The artist emailed images that she has been making to the writer, who responded with a text inspired by the encounter. The artist then responded to that text with a new image and so on. This activity occurred over the course of a week, in October 2021.
This email exchange and publication was facilitated by Miguel Amado, director of SIRIUS.
Download here.
Desire is a publication born out of conversations and writing that occurred during the Existing in Dialogue workshop at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre in November 2022.
Forthcoming.
Reading at Sirius Arts Centre, October 2023.
Partly published in MAP magazine:
‘I had a dream last night: Politics and Repetition’ 2023.
‘The sound of my voice will haunt you: A Call To Gossip’ 2023.
Solo show produced by Bloomers and curated by Kim Crowley. Forthcoming.
Opening October 5th, 17.30-19.00 at St. Luke’s Crypt, Cork City.
2020 exhibition at the Sternview Gallery, Cork City
Sternview Graduate Award (2018)
The title of this exhibition, A Place Where a Thought Might Grow, refers to the poem A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford by Derek Mahon. This verse dwells on the plant-life of a disused shed before opening up to larger themes such as time, history and space. It possesses a panoramic wide focus mediating on the place of humanity within the world.
Long’s work is concerned with the idea of the landscape as a receptacle of human ideas, a place where nature and allegory are intrinsically intertwined, a place where a thought might grow. Her painting series aims to create a credible world from which she questions the reality of mankind’s projections. Working from intuition and intention, Long’s process reveals the artist’s hand and a physical engagement with materials.
The work takes inspiration from the Greek primordial space Chaos, the great chasm from which life exploded and thoughts grew. Long has combined painting and drawing in order to emphasise the tumultuous origins of nature. The works act as terrains of many whims sparked by a variety of different texts, poems and stories. The viewer is invited to enter this fictional landscape.
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).
How to Resist A State of Forgetfulness was exhibited at SO Fine Art Editions in November 2021.
The title of the show refers to the essay in which art critic John Berger considers whether nature can be ‘read’ as a text or language through the process of drawing and engagement. He further reflects on whether the uncovering of this natural mother-tongue might help us to resist the ‘historic amnesia’ of the modern era. Inspired by these ideals, Long’s new body of work delves into the relationship between language and the landscape, combining painting, drawing and mark-making to create intriguing works that both examine and play with natural forms.
Exhibition Text
and in conversation with the goddess Danú
dripping in dialogue –
A line comes out to say hello; ‘please picture me!’
It puffs and bleeds
and billows
stringing out sentences in a line,
catching and cradling
contours and corners
Crowning the head of a petal or a tree.
Casting and creating upwards, all-around-you
and nestling you to sleep
with a spike, a squiggle or a scrawl!
It collects,
pools and
congeals
until you believe you are a woman trapped;
A bramble mixed up with the furies of the celestial past
or the further heavens above.
It’s definitely not the type of system you would invent if you were designing it – but behind the myth you are holding the whole world.
Sarah Long | Artist 