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Sarah Long: Aisling Is a Dream review – Ambitious exhibition builds powerful symbolic forms
Sarah Long: Aisling Is a Dream
SO Fine Art Editions, Dublin
★★★★☆
I first encountered the work of Sarah Long, whose aesthetic is immediately recognisable, in a group exhibition by the Cork-based collective
Backwater Artists
in October 2024. She contributed a trio of small, intricate acrylics that depicted vibrantly colourful forest scenes. They were teeming with life, though people and animals were absent: Long's focus was instead on the swarming choreography of foliage and vegetation.
The design of each element had an almost labyrinthine quality, produced with painstaking attention to detail. The mixed-media paintings also had an anachronistic spirit: they could have been illustrations from an early-20th-century children's book. Consequently, Long's lively but mute worlds were coated with layers of nostalgia, along with the senses of loss and bygone love that accompany its evocation.
This new exhibition retains some of those elements, but mutated, reinvented, employing them in ambitious, radically new contexts: the artist's naturalist tendencies are now brought to bear in the construction of powerful symbolic forms.
Aisling Is a Dream: Do This in Parody of Me, by Sarah Long
The show's title references the aisling poetic genre, in which Ireland is personified as a woman, appearing in a poet's dream to comment on the country's dire political and social circumstances. The Irish philosopher and mystic
John Moriarty
referred to aislings as dream visions that were popular with 'people who, religiously, politically and economically, had been dispossessed'. Aogán Ó Rathaille, a 17th-century bard credited as the father of the genre, is referenced in the show notes, as are modern poets such as
Eavan Boland
,
WB Yeats
and
Seamus Heaney
, all of whom Long draws on to weave her visual narratives.
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Central to the exhibition's symbolism is the fern, a plant whose reproductive nature and ancient origins make it a richly allegorical motif. Unlike plants that rely on fertilisation and pollination, ferns are able to create offspring asexually, proliferating via spores and rhizomes that result in cellular clones. Many species of fern are native to Ireland, and the plant appears throughout Long's paintings in a blend of quasi-religious iconography, personal memory and feminist representational forms.
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Take her work I Thought Her the Queen of the Land. This impressive large-scale canvas revolves around a single vertical fern; it is flanked by a pair of yellow triangles and capped by a crown that is, in turn, lit by a golden halo. On either side of the central panel is a nebula of pulsing reds, purples and yellows that look like flickering tea lights or roses waving in the wind.
The whole composition rests on a foundation of pink shapes that are reminiscent of a stone wall or of the interlocking vascular cells within leaf tissue. The work's title is painted into the canvas, along with a patchwork of sentences that cannot be deciphered easily – the artist published her novella w/W in 2024, and there are traces of writing throughout the exhibition, providing another stratum of meaning in these semantically charged paintings.
Aisling Is a Dream continues at
SO Fine Art Editions
, Dublin, until Saturday, June 28th
