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‘I’m never going to be able to sleep out here’ invites the reader into the confidence, and bedroom, of the autofictional character Mary. She implores you to listen and decipher her strange visions.
Mary is a body, a woman trapped, Mother Ireland, you, me, us, Sarah, a mortal bean, a big sack of potatoes, a shapeshifter, a girl, a curled up fiddlehead, a voice to be ignored, a voice to be listened to, a public persona, a private thought, a never ending monologue.
Mary is an allegory of a painting.
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Artist Sarah Long uses the aesthetics and fluidity of girlhood as a mode of criticality, probing ideas of personal and national identity.
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These ruminations expand off the page in the form of Sarah’s debut spoken word album ‘I Want to Talk About Ireland’, set against a musical landscape of cinematic sound design, strings and electronic beats. (Produced by Laurie Shaw)
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Invoking the language of dreams, Sarah identifies reverberations in Irish culture and combines these references with personal stories and motifs. She views 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, specifically our notions of the Irish nation.
The work expands on the tradition of the aisling—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.
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