Aisling Is A Dream

By Sarah Long

31st May – 28th June, 2025 @ SO Fine Art Editions, Dublin.

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 plant appears throughout those seven paintings and continues her interest in reflecting on its potential allegorical qualities. 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.

About the Artist

Sarah Long is an artist based in Cork. She focuses on suppressed female archetypes, the politics of representation, nationhood, and myth through the lens of feminism. The work is rooted in Irish culture, highlighting moments and ideas that haunt, shape and subjugate our collective consciousness.

Long’s work spans painting, performance, installation, and writing. In painting, she eschews depicting the female body and instead positions the ‘bodily’ in the tradition of landscape to contest the historical male gaze. She understands landscape as an area of contradiction, both a space for the interior world to expand and the site of a patriarchal literary tradition that personifies the land as an archetype of the female ideal. She engages with practices of both figuration (employing flora as an allegorical approach) and abstraction (indexing of the body through gesture). 

Long’s solo shows include South Tipperary Arts Centre, Clonmel (2025); St. Luke’s Crypt, Cork City Council (2023); SO Fine Art Editions, Dublin (2021); Sternview Gallery, Cork (2020); and Studio 12, Backwater Artist Group, Cork (2019). Her recent group shows include Studio 12, Backwater Artist Group, Cork (2025); Pallas Projects/Studios, Dublin (2024); LHQ Gallery, Cork County Library (2024). Her debut novella, W/w, was published by Bloomers in 2024. Her work is in the collection of the Office of Public Works and Dublin City University, among others.

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Click on the thumbnails below to see full image of the works.