Aisling Is A Dream
“The artist’s paintings are a blend of quasi-religious iconography, personal memory, poetic allusion and feminist semiotics.” – Tom Lordon, The Irish Times (read here)
The exhibition Aisling Is a Dream features a selection of new and reimagined works. The title refers to an existing group of seven paintings that respond to different aislings. Aisling is the Irish term for ‘dream’ or ‘vision’. It is also the name of a poetic genre where the Irish nation appears to the poet as a woman, often employed to reflect on the political and social concerns of any given times.
The fern appears throughout those seven paintings, continuing Long’s interest in the potential allegorical qualities of the plant. The fern’s ability to reproduce asexually and sexually through the production of spores, along side its primeval origins, has generated a rich mythology, in particular that of the imaginary ‘fern flower’.
Long cites aislings by Eavan Boland, W.B Yeats, Seamus Heaney, and Aogán Ó Rathaille, among others, to draw connections with themes in Irish culture that inform dominant perspectives on the female condition. In addition, iconic paintings by Daniel MacDonald, Michael Farrell and Paul Henry are alluded to, while references to Greek mythology, Hughes Merle and the Renaissance master Titian explore prevailing imageries in European art more broadly.
In the new painting series, Long combines these references with personal stories and motifs. She mixes religious iconography with handwritten lines of folk songs and the practice of daisy chain making that defined her girlhood. In I Rose Up and Told My Story, for instance, she invokes Michael Farrell’s painting Madonna Irlanda (1978), but replaces the image of the Vitruvian Man with a Síle na gig. She views this rearranging and reinterpreting of histories and visualities as an act of feminist fictioning.
Sarah Long | Artist 