Sarah Longley is an Irish artist based in Scotland. Sarah graduated with First Class Honours in Drawing & Painting from Edinburgh College of Art and completed her Masters Degree in Fine Art there in 2001. She lived in Edinburgh for many years before relocating to the north-west Highlands of Scotland six years ago. The natural surroundings of her home in Lochalsh provide a continuous seam of inspiration. Her work is held in public and private collections throughout Europe, including in the Crawford Municipal Gallery in Cork, Ireland. Sarah’s pen & ink portrait of Helen Lewis was acquired by the Crescent Arts Centre Belfast, site of the Helen Lewis Dance Studio, in the course of this solo exhibition.
In addition to a rich body of work in portraiture, self-portraiture, nature studies and landscape, Sarah often works collaboratively with her father, the poet Michael Longley CBE. Sarah’s pen & ink drawings and large scale charcoal works in the exhibition are responses to her father’s poetry collections Sea Asters (2015), The Dipper’s Range (2016) and Ghetto (2019), all published by Andrew J Moorhouse’s Fine Press Poetry. The Ghetto sequence is being seen for the first time. Sarah’s large scale charcoal drawings inspired by Angel Hill (Cape Poetry, 2017) and After Amergin are also featured.
Sarah’s solo exhibition opened on Saturday 23rd February with a very special poetry reading in the gallery by Michael Longley, surrounded by his daughter’s artworks.
“The strength of her work rests not only on her assiduous attention to the demands of each area of subject matter, but also, very much, on the consistency of her dark-edged vision.” -Aidan Dunne, Irish Times
Gallery events: on Saturday 30th March, long-standing friend of the Longleys, Professor Douglas Dunn gave a poetry reading in the gallery, the first in a series celebrating the wealth of international literary accomplishment in our local community. Douglas Dunn has been described as ‘the most respected Scottish poet of his generation’. He is also a renowned editor and critic. The Noise of a Fly (2017) is the first collection from Douglas Dunn in sixteen years, and the first since he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2013. His books – including eleven collections of poetry, two short stories collections and a translation of Racine’s Andromache – were all published to critical acclaim. His work has been extensively translated, including into the French, German, Spanish, Italian, Norwegian, Slovak, Armenian and Japanese. He is the editor of The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry. Douglas Dunn was joined on the day by Canadian poet Patrick Errington and by two favourite poets from our Landmarks exhibition, Bashabi Fraser and Alan Riach.
