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.

Her practice spans painting, installation, performance and writing. She identifies reverberations in Irish culture and combines these references with personal stories and motifs. She views this rearranging and reinterpreting of histories and visualities as an act of feminist fictioning, highlighting moments and ideas that haunt, shape and subjugate our collective consciousness.

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).

In parallel, the mediums of writing, sound, and performance enable her to fictionalise and commentate on contemporary female experience through the persona of her autofictional character, Mary–a present-day embodiment of the Mother Ireland figure.