The Licks Within The Lips

October 2024, St. Luke’s Crypt, Cork City

The Licks Within The Lip is a solo exhibition by artist Sarah Long. The exhibition reflects on the relationship between language and the creation of landscapes and space.

Long’s work is inherently tactile and process-driven, exploring how stories shape spaces and how this, in turn, structures our experience. Her practice reclaims the inherited patriarchal Mother Ireland figure in a visual experience that focuses on the landscape as a space where the body can expand. The landscape acts as a framework for Long’s practice, allowing the work to reflect on the influence of Irish history and literature on both cultural memory and collective perspectives of space.

The exhibition explores Long’s approach to the landscape through painting installation, sound and moving image work. Long’s painting installation Seven Ways To Get Back responds to the idea that folklore is a form of gossip that shapes our perception and experience of space. The paintings are installed together and can be understood as a singular work that houses multiple and contradicting narratives.

Sound and moving image works Beat Time and Stalks and Shadows can be viewed as an alternative mapping of the terrain of a fixed space. Animated line drawings move along hedgerows, making many twists and turns. In Beat Time the repetition of the words 'beat time' reinforces the presence of a consciousness. Long’s multifaceted approach seeks to challenge how we create identity and occupy space in a time of increasing precarity.

Photography by Celeste Burdon