In an era dominated by instant gratification and pixelated perfection, Louise Wallace's work resonates with a rare depthdeliberate, soulful, and almost spiritual in its pace and presence. Her paintings invite viewers into a world where colour breathes, form sings, and meaning unfolds slowly over time. Rather than chasing trends or spectacle, Wallace crafts visual experiences that are textured with time, memory, and a distinct sense of rhythm.
Her path to becoming one of the most compelling painters of her generation was far from traditional. Before she found her artistic footing in front of a canvas, Wallace navigated vastly different worlds: the structured realm of law and the emotive terrain of music. Both disciplines demanded opposing qualitiesprecision and spontaneity, logic and emotionand yet, this fusion now underpins the richness of her art.
Her background in law sharpened her ability to dissect complex problems, analyze visual structures, and build compositional logic within her paintings. That mental rigor doesn’t restrict her; instead, it scaffolds her creativity, giving her work an underlying architectural strength. Meanwhile, her immersion in music awakened her intuitive understanding of cadence and harmony skills that later translated into the visual rhythms and colour orchestrations that define her style.
The transformative moment came unexpectedly. In her late twenties, Wallace received life drawing classes as a gift. What began as a casual reintroduction to creativity soon ignited a dormant passion. From that point on, she redirected her path with unwavering clarity. She enrolled at the Belfast School of Art, immersing herself in the tactile and meditative rituals of painting. These were not just classes; they were initiations into a lifelong vocation. The mixing of pigment, the tension of stretched linen, and the endless practice in the life room became her grounding ritualsanchoring her not just in technique, but in a deeper purpose.
Her academic pursuit extended far beyond foundational training. Wallace’s journey culminated in a PhD, a testimony to her commitment to understanding painting not only as an act of making but as a field of inquiry. That same spirit of investigation now informs her work as a lecturer in painting at the very institution where her journey began. Her studio practice and her teaching inform each other, creating a cyclical rhythm of growth, reflection, and exchange.
Studio as Sanctuary: Ritual, Repetition, and the Dance of Materials
Nestled at the bottom of her garden is Wallace’s studio sanctuary that serves as both her retreat and laboratory. This space, cloaked in natural light and surrounded by the quiet pulse of everyday life, is where ideas marinate and compositions evolve. Her days often begin not with the brush, but with movement: a run, a dog walk, or simply observing how the light changes through the trees. These daily rituals prepare her mind for the creative act, aligning her with a slower, more receptive pace.
Inside the studio, her process unfolds gradually and intuitively. The beginning of a painting might involve arranging objects, tearing paper, or listening to music that helps establish the emotional tone for the day. These moments of preparation are anything but trivialthey create the conditions for authenticity and spontaneity.
Drawing lies at the heart of her practice. Far from being merely preparatory, drawing is a generative force in Wallace’s visual language. She often begins with photographs, but they serve only as loose scaffolds. Through sketching, collage, and manipulation, these images are transformed into new forms that hover between figuration and abstraction. Her studio walls become a living mosaic filled with evolving collaged drawings, half-formed ideas, and visual whispers that might later echo in a completed painting.
Paper stencils are another vital part of her toolkit. These handmade years-old, others freshly function as compositional cues and tools of discovery. Their use reflects a duality of control and surrender. With scissors in hand, she navigates the line between precision and spontaneity. Some stencils are reused again and again, their worn edges acquiring a history of their own. These humble tools become glyphs in her evolving visual language, offering new ways to understand space, form, and movement.
In addition to traditional oils, Wallace incorporates unexpected materials like household paints during the early stages of her process. These low-stakes materials free her from the pressure of perfection and encourage experimentation. The playfulness of these early studies often leads to unexpected breakthrough moments when a composition begins to speak with its voice.
Painting, for Wallace, is never a straightforward endeavor. Canvases are constantly in flux. She may begin with a ground of Yellow Ochre or Raw Umber, then draw directly into the wet surface. If a composition feels unresolved, she is not afraid to scrape it back, erase it entirely, or begin anew. Each decisioneach mark, removal, or adjustmentadds a layer of memory. Over time, these accumulated layers create paintings that feel lived-in, emotionally resonant, and full of visual history.
Colour is a living entity in her work. It is not just an aesthetic decision but a conceptual one. High-key hues like Napthol Red, Bright Yellow Lake, and Lemon Yellow shimmer beneath glazes of deeper tones, building luminous surfaces that feel alive with energy. In her widely admired painting "Pond Nite Life," this interplay culminates in a chromatic dialogue that pulses with nocturnal energy. Ultramarine Blue dances with Venetian Red and Cadmium Orange, while translucent veils unify the palette into a coherent symphony. These hues do not simply decorate the surfacethey animate it, suggesting an inner luminosity that vibrates beneath the visible.
A Practice Rooted in Listening, Learning, and Lifelong Evolution
Louise Wallace’s work doesn’t shoutit resonates. Her paintings reward not just a glance but a gaze. They ask the viewer to linger, to look again, to engage with the quiet intelligence of layered process and considered gesture. This commitment to depth over immediacy is not only evident in her visual language but in the way she navigates the ebb and flow of the creative life.
She is deeply attuned to cycles of energy and inertia. When her studio practice begins to feel stagnant, she doesn’t force momentum. Instead, she seeks renewal in movement, travel, and conversation. Whether it’s walking through a forest, visiting galleries, or discussing ideas with fellow artists, Wallace recognizes that inspiration often arrives from the periphery. These diversions are not detours; they are fuel. Studio visits with peers are especially valuable spaces where vulnerability is shared and fresh perspectives emerge.
Her artistic influences are diverse and nuanced. She draws from a rich lineage that includes the sensitive brushwork of Édouard Manet, the audacious colour play of Henri Matisse, and the emotional resonance of Edvard Munch. Yet she also looks to contemporary artists such as Susan Connolly, Mary T Keown, and Joy Gerrard, whose boldness and integrity challenge and expand her boundaries.
Perhaps most profoundly, she is nourished by the energy of her students. Teaching is not a distraction from her practice but an integral part of it. The raw experimentation, fearless mark-making, and inquisitive spirits of emerging artists reignite her sense of purpose. In guiding others, she sharpens her clarity.
One guiding principle continues to echo through her practice piece of advice once given by her tutor David Crone: “If you put something down, move it.” This deceptively simple maxim encapsulates a core truth of Wallace’s philosophy: that art must remain in motion. Stasis is the enemy of vitality. By allowing her paintings to evolve freely, she stays open to surprise, revelation, and renewal.
Ultimately, Louise Wallace is an artist who listens deeply continuously and with great care. She listens to her materials, her environment, her memories, and her community. Her paintings are acts of quiet generosity, offering space for contemplation in a world that rarely pauses. In a cultural moment obsessed with velocity, virality, and volume, Wallace reminds us of another possibility: that beauty can emerge through slowness, that insight can arise from patience, and that meaning can be built, layer by thoughtful layer.
Her art is not an escape from the world, but a deeper engagement with it. And in this way, she shows us that painting at its most powerful is not just an image, but an experience.
Inside the Mindful Laboratory: Ritual, Rhythm, and the Architecture of Creativity
Louise Wallace’s studio practice is a meditation inmotiona a space where instinct is shaped by discipline, and intuition dances with routine. Her studio, nestled discreetly at the end of her garden, is far more than a creative shelter. It’s a deeply personal arena, a site where thoughts crystallize into form and pigment becomes the language of exploration. This intimate sanctuary exists as both an escape and a grounding place, connecting her inner vision to the tactile world through repeated, mindful gestures.
Each day unfolds through a series of physical rituals, grounding her body before she engages with the canvas. A morning run across open terrain, followed by quiet walks with her dog through soft daylight, are not detours from work; they are part of it. Coffee becomes a small ceremony, while music spins through her studio space, stirring memory and mood. These acts of embodiment lay the groundwork for visual articulation. They are precursors to the paintbrush, syncing mind and muscle before anything touches the surface.
Entering Wallace’s studio is like stepping into a live archive of thought. There is a curated disarray organic mingling of planning and spontaneity. Tables bristle with pigment tubes, stencils, scissors, brushes, and scraps of paper. The walls host an ever-evolving salon of works-in-progress, fragments of reference photos, and collages torn apart and rebuilt. Yet nothing remains static for long. Her space thrives on flux, and this ever-changing configuration fuels her ideas. She rotates canvases, rearranges furniture, and moves visual elements constantly, seeking new synergies that emerge from proximity and layering.
This state of dynamic tension fosters a heightened visual awareness. Wallace doesn’t chase chaos for its own sake but invites unpredictability into conversation with structure. Her practice is informed by a belief that spontaneity needs an architecture within which to bloom. Her studio operates as both a testing ground and a stage, where compositional elements are cast, reshuffled, and sometimes erased to make room for something unforeseen.
The Alchemy of Process: Drawing, Material Intimacy, and Chromatic Intelligence
At the heart of Wallace’s work lies a devotion to drawingnot as mere draftsmanship, but as a method of inquiry. Her drawings begin with photographic images, but these are never treated as fixed realities. Instead, they act as provocations, sparking an intuitive journey through line, texture, and material. She disassembles these prompts through mark-making, layering, and tearing. The resulting collages feel like discoveries rather than constructionsfragments that whisper new directions, fragments that beckon her toward something that didn’t exist before.
These ephemeral montages are far from mere studies. They are transformative events, where representation gives way to abstraction, and control gives way to curiosity. She rarely treats these works as definitive; they are oracles, speculative maps of possibility. Each torn edge or overlaid mark serves as an invitation to rethink, not to confirm what is known, but to allow ambiguity to guide.
A unique feature of Wallace’s approach is her use of stencils, which she creates spontaneously and archives over the years. These hand-cut paper shapes evolve into visual motifs, their edges softened by time and repeated use. They are not tools of replication but of rhythm characters in an ongoing visual play. When called upon, they bring with them the memory of past works, forming a bridge between phases of her evolving language. The cut shapes are laid down with instinct and later reassessed. Some forms reappear across canvases like echoes, creating a formal continuity without predictability.
Oil paint is Wallace’s preferred medium, and her relationship with it is deeply physical. She gravitates toward paints with high pigmentation and rich body that yield to blending, allow for translucency, and reveal depth over time. The process often begins with earthy underlayers: Raw Umber, Yellow Ochre, Burnt Sienna. These muted tones form the soil from which brighter, higher-chroma hues emerge. Against this base, she introduces vibrant spikesLemon Yellow slicing through shadow, Napthol Red colliding with sienna, Cadmium Orange blazing beside deep violet. Her handling of color is never gratuitous. There is a precise orchestration behind each chromatic encounter. Complementary colors clash and hum, discordant tones provoke, while cooler neutrals offer moments of calm. This nuanced palette lends her work an electric atmospherecharged, but never overwhelming.
Her canvases are rarely approached as single, isolated statements. Multiple works unfold simultaneously across the studio, creating a network of visual conversations. This dialogic method enables one canvas to solve a problem posed in another, or to disrupt a tendency that feels too resolved. It dismantles any preciousness around individual works and encourages continuity across bodies of work. Some paintings take weeks; others linger for years, waiting for the right gesture or accident to awaken them.
Scraping, layering, and editing are central to her process. If early marks fall flat or feel forced, they are removednot out of frustration, but in pursuit of clarity. These removals leave behind ghostly residues, a visible history that enriches the surface. The accumulated gestures form a palimpsest of intention and revision, creating a sense of depth that’s both literal and conceptual. This willingness to revise reflects a commitment to integrity. Nothing is sacred; everything is negotiable.
Context, Connection, and the Expanding Field of Practice
Louise Wallace’s practice does not exist in isolation. It is woven into a larger cultural and geographic tapestry. As an artist working from Northern Ireland, she engages with both the local landscape and the international art conversation. The peripheral status of the region presents challenges: geographic remoteness, limited institutional attention, and underexposure of artists working outside metropolitan centers. Yet rather than retreat from these challenges, Wallace actively confronts them. She advocates for her community, drawing attention to the richness of Northern Irish contemporary art. She speaks out, curates, shares, and insists that curators and audiences look beyond traditional cultural centers. Her work is not only a personal practice but also a form of cultural resistance and advocacy.
This commitment extends to her role as an educator. Teaching painting at a university level is not ancillary to her studio workit is entwined with it. She learns through her students, their uncensored approaches, their fearlessness with materials, their refusal to play safe. Their mistakes become her insights. Their playful divergence from norms pushes her to reassess her methods. In critiquing their work, she finds language for her own. In supporting their risk-taking, she renews her appetite for the unknown.
Art historical references permeate Wallace’s practice, though not through direct citation. The elegance of Manet’s ambiguity, the lyrical economy of Matisse, the emotional heat of Munchthese influences inform her sense of composition, gesture, and chromatic language. Likewise, the material investigations of her peers, such as Susan Connolly and Mary T. Keown, nourish her thinking. These are not simply aesthetic touchstones; they are part of a shared ethos. Their work resonates through mutual commitment to experimentation and conceptual resilience.
Her expanding practice now includes ceramicsidiosyncratic sculptural forms that extend her interest in hybridity, mythology, and ornament. These ceramic beingsmany-eyed, fantastical, humorously grotesquecarry the same spatial intelligence and chromatic energy as her paintings. They emerge from a similar curiosity: how form can suggest meaning without prescribing it, how texture and color can evoke emotion without narrative. This foray into three-dimensional work signals not a departure, but a deepening of her vocabulary.
Wallace embraces ambiguity not as a weakness but as a strength. Her studio is a site of open-ended inquiry, where not-knowing becomes fertile ground. She moves through doubt with curiosity, allowing space for failure, rupture, and reimagining. In a culture often obsessed with certainty, she invites us to consider the value of what remains unresolved. Her works do not assert meaningthey invite encounter. They don’t instructthey reveal. They welcome the viewer into a space of reverie, where thought and feeling are inseparable.
In this way, Louise Wallace’s studio becomes more than a roomit is a philosophy made tangible. Here, every mark, pause, and reinvention serves as evidence of an ongoing negotiation with the act of making. She paints not to illustrate what she knows, but to discover what she doesn’t. And in that pursuit, her work opens itself to usnot with answers, but with possibility.
The Alchemy of Colour: Emotional Resonance and Chromatic Intelligence
For Louise Wallace, colour is not a superficial tool or aesthetic flourish; it is a language of deep emotion and memory, a form of embodied cognition, and a portal to unseen inner states. It breathes life into her canvases, acting as both anchor and ignition. Her nuanced relationship with hue stretches beyond formal considerations, becoming a method of internal exploration and an articulation of what cannot be said in words. Each painting she creates serves as a meditation in tone and texture, where the chromatic elements are not passively applied but actively shape the emotional terrain of the work.
Wallace begins each painting not with an explosion of colour, but with grounded, earthen tonessubtle shades like Yellow Ochre, Burnt Sienna, and Raw Umber. These muted, sedimentary hues form the foundation upon which her visual symphonies are constructed. This deliberate restraint creates a tonal gravity, a ballast of emotion and history that allows her later, more luminous colours to soar without becoming garish. These early layers are essential not only in compositional terms but also in emotional resonancethey root the painting in a lived, physical world before it takes flight into abstraction and transformation.
As she moves through the painting process, Wallace introduces higher-chroma pigments like Napthol Red, Bright Yellow Lake, and vibrant Magentas. But even these intense hues do not sit atop the canvas without intention. Instead, they emerge from the substratum, filtered and modulated by the tones beneath. This interaction of layers is central to Wallace’s unique concept of "ascending light, "an idea suggesting that luminosity can emerge from within the painting rather than being imposed from outside. Rather than adding light as an illusion, she builds it through transparent glazes, chromatic juxtaposition, and painstaking modulation, creating surfaces that seem to glow from within.
Her colour relationships are rarely about sheer intensity or dramatic opposition. Instead, they are built through subtlety and sensitivity. Wallace has developed an almost synesthetic awareness of colors, speaking of it in terms of sound, temperature, and emotional timbre. The choice of a colour might arise through chance encounters, intuitive decisions, or the interplay of tones in her collaged drawings. In her world, a deep violet might hum with melancholy, while a shaft of lemon yellow suggests joy or illumination. Her hues are not merely coloursthey are characters, moods, and memories woven into pigment.
Chromatic Process: Intuition, Memory, and Emotional Topography
The act of painting, for Wallace, is a deeply process-oriented iterative journey shaped by time, texture, and instinct. Her award-winning work, Pond Nite Life, exemplifies this approach. In this painting, cool tonalities dominateUltramarine, Indigo, and Prussian Blue cascade across the surface, evoking a sense of depth and nocturnal movement. Interspersed among these deep shades are surprising flashes of Lemon Yellow and Venetian Red, which seem to flicker like distant lights or brief memories surfacing in the dark. These contrasts create not dissonance butdialoguee a hue answering another in quiet but profound conversation.
Such compositions are not composed in haste. They evolve, through the addition and subtraction of layers, through the patient recalibration of hue, intensity, and balance. Wallace will often add dozens of layers to a single work, scraping back areas, glazing over others, and reworking surfaces until they hold a kind of emotional and visual equilibrium. The result is a surface that is alive with history palimpsest of choices, hesitations, and revelations.
What gives Wallace’s colour strategy its psychological weight is her attentiveness to experience. Her palette is never fixed; it shifts about her environment, her state of mind, and even the music playing in her studio. Sound becomes a chromatic influence, as do light conditions, memories of particular landscapes, or fragments of conversation. This openness to lived experience is one of the reasons her work carries such emotional gravity feels as though the paintings are not simply seen, but felt.
Her studio is filled with pinned collaged sketchespreliminary studies created using household paint samples. These modest tester pots, often sourced without ceremony, become tools for radical experimentation. On paper, Wallace explores unlikely pairingsacid greens with dusty mauves, metallic golds beside dulled charcoalswithout the pressure of permanence. These chromatic improvisations frequently inform her larger works, guiding the compositions towards unexpected solutions. While seemingly casual, these studies embody the rigour and freedom of her practice: the willingness to test, to fail, and to reconfigure until the colour sings in just the right register.
Wallace frequently uses metaphors to describe color, not as affectation, but as a genuine reflection of her visceral engagement with paint. Colour, for her, has a physical presence. A streak of Cadmium Orange might rush across the canvas like a shout, whereas a swathe of Payne’s Grey can hang like a whispered fog. These descriptions reveal a deep corporeal connection with her material hue, a performer in a drama, each interaction a movement within the choreography of the painting.
Light, Materiality, and the Expanding Field of Colour
One of the defining elements of Wallace’s mature work is her ability to modulate colour with surgical precision. Rarely does she use pigments in their pure form. Even the brightest pinks are softened or challenged with complementary tones, touch of green here, a trace of grey therecreating a tension that deepens the viewer’s experience. This modulation prevents the eye from settling too quickly; it invites slow looking, extended engagement, and repeated discovery. Her colours seem to shimmer, not because they shout, but because they resonate, each layer vibrating against the next in subtle yet potent ways.
Wallace is acutely aware of how colour behaves at scale. A hue that feels electric on a small panel may feel overwhelming on a large canvas. As such, she adapts saturation and transparency to fit the rhythm and structure of the work. This sensitivity extends to texture and surface quality as well. Some areas of her paintings are dense and waxy, built up to hold a visceral presence; others are scraped back to a ghostly translucency, allowing the underlayers to whisper through. This dance between opacity and transparency, density and lightness, gives her work its distinctive material richness.
Her idea of "ascending light" is both visual and philosophical. It suggests a world where illumination comes not from external sources but from internal processes. It mirrors her belief in gradual transformation that emerges not through rupture but through quiet, accumulative shifts. This belief is not confined to the canvas; it extends to her understanding of life, memory, and meaning. In Wallace’s hands, painting becomes a luminous form of thought, a way to process the invisible dimensions of experience.
Wallace's engagement with the history of painting further deepens her chromatic sensibility. She draws inspiration from Matisse’s orchestrated colour fields, Manet’s tonal modulations, and the emotionally charged palettes of Munch. But her voice remains singular. There is a quality in her colour relationshipssomething irreducible and hard-won that resists imitation. She has developed a language that is as intuitive as it is deliberate, where every stroke of colour carries with it the residue of inquiry, emotion, and time.
In recent years, her practice has expanded into new territory. Her interest in iridescence and reflectivity has led to the use of pearlescent glazes, translucent veils, and metallic interventions. These additions push her work into a more dynamic space, where colour shifts depending on the angle of view and the quality of light. The surface becomes an interactive site of perceptual choreography in which viewers are drawn into movement, into awareness. These elements introduce a new temporality into the paintings, making colour not just a fixed attribute, but a lived event.
Her sculptural worksparticularly ceramic figures glazed in bold, lurid tonesextend this exploration into three dimensions. These mythological hybrids, equal parts playful and uncanny, carry forward her chromatic intelligence. The same chromatic tensions and modulations that define her paintings appear here in physical form, rendered in glazes that gleam, crackle, and blur the line between the beautiful and the grotesque.
Louise Wallace’s relationship with colour is devotional, not didactic. She does not aim to explain colour through theory or logic; she learns from it through doing. Each painting becomes a field of negotiationa meeting ground for emotion, intuition, technique, and transformation. Through colour, she thinks, remembers, and imagines. It becomes more than a visual elementit becomes a luminous, enduring thought.
Echoing Connections in the Art World: Louise Wallace’s Expanding Influence
Louise Wallace’s artistic journey is far from isolated; it extends beyond the confines of her private studio, resonating with a network of artists, curators, students, and communities. Her practice is not only shaped by her reflection and experimentation but is constantly in dialogue with the broader art world. Wallace’s art is characterized by its emotional depth, vibrant colors, and dynamic light, which flow across her canvases with rich complexity. As a part of Northern Ireland’s artistic fabric, Wallace has woven herself into a collective artistic presence that is both nurturing and productive, engaging in mutual exchanges that push the boundaries of her creative process.
For Wallace, her geographic locationbased in Belfastholds both significance and challenge. Northern Ireland's place in the global art narrative is often marginalized, with its artists and their work sometimes overlooked in the larger conversation. But rather than retreating into seclusion, Wallace sees this as an opportunity to champion the work of her peers. She firmly believes in the power of artists from this underrepresented region, advocating for their visibility and impact. Instead of seeking inclusion, Wallace pushes for an active rethinking of how contemporary art is curated and perceived. Her call is one of attentiveness plea for the artistic contributions from places like Northern Ireland to be seen and valued within the global art community.
Through her artistic engagement and advocacy, Wallace has sought to shift how the world views art from regions often overshadowed by larger art capitals. She brings this sense of advocacy into her teaching, positioning her role as a mentor not just as an educational responsibility but as a space for reciprocal learning. Wallace sees her studentsmany of whom come from diverse backgrounds collaborators in a shared process of discovery. Their fresh perspectives challenge her assumptions and ignite new creative energy in her work. In critiques and one-on-one sessions, Wallace encourages her students to embrace risk, failure, and innovation, transforming mistakes into meaningful moments of reflection. This approach mirrors her artistic process, where exploration and adaptation are vital.
Teaching as Transformation: The Intersection of Pedagogy and Practice
As a teacher, Louise Wallace embodies the same fluidity and openness that define her artistic approach. She does not see herself as the ultimate authority but as a participant in a continual exchange. Her students benefit from her willingness to adapt and respond to their needs, and in turn, Wallace draws inspiration from their work, often discovering new pathways for her creative exploration. The classroom becomes a living, breathing extension of the artistic community Wallace has worked to foster throughout her career. She views her teaching practice as much about learning as it is about instructing, with every session providing new opportunities to question the norms of both art and education.
Wallace’s educational philosophy emphasizes the value of open-mindedness and exploration in the artistic journey. She strives to create an environment where students are encouraged to go beyond their comfort zones, experiment without fear of failure, and cultivate their artistic voices. This ethos, which mirrors her practice, is deeply rooted in the idea of transformation of both the artist and their work. Wallace’s classroom becomes a space where traditional notions of style and technique are challenged, and where students learn the importance of process over perfection. In this dynamic setting, mistakes are not to be feared but celebrated as moments of discovery that can lead to profound artistic breakthroughs.
Her pedagogy is an extension of the principles that govern her studio practice: attentiveness to material, a commitment to exploration, and an openness to transformation. Whether she is guiding students through a painting critique or helping them navigate the complexities of a new medium, Wallace’s approach fosters a spirit of collaboration and growth. Her commitment to artistic integrity is evident in her belief that students, like artists, must learn to follow their instincts, trust their creative impulses, and develop a deep, personal connection with their work. By cultivating an atmosphere where experimentation is not only welcomed but encouraged, Wallace helps her students embrace the unpredictable, organic nature of art-making lessons she has lived throughout her varied and evolving career.
Expanding Horizons: Sculpture and the Evolution of Wallace’s Artistic Vision
While painting remains at the heart of Louise Wallace’s practice, her recent exploration into sculpture reveals an exciting expansion of her artistic vocabulary. This new dimension to her work does not signify a departure from her roots in painting but rather a natural progression into new forms of expression. Wallace’s ceramic figures, imbued with a sense of humor, whimsy, and mythological undertones, are an extension of the same curiosity that informs her paintings. These sculptural worksoften quirky, abstract, and playfultake on a life of their own, inviting both introspection and delight.
Her transition into sculpture is an exploration of new material possibilities. Wallace approaches her ceramic practice with the same tactile sensitivity that she brings to her paintings. The fluidity of clay, like paint, invites experimentation and spontaneity. Wallace’s new works evoke a sense of playfulness, with figures that resemble garden ornaments or fantastical creatures. Yet, beneath their humor lies a deeper commentary on themes of hybridity, transformation, and the interplay between the human and the non-human. The figures, often adorned with multiple eyes or exaggerated forms, offer a subversive take on the human figure, blending the sacred with the ordinary in a way that is uniquely Wallace.
The shift to sculpture represents Wallace’s broader artistic philosophy of embracing change and resisting the boundaries of any single medium. Whether working with oil paints, clay, or other materials, her focus remains consistent: a commitment to intuition, process, and transformation. For Wallace, the decision to explore new mediums is not about departing from the past but expanding the possibilities of her work. Sculpture, much like her paintings, is an opportunity to explore form, color, and texture in ways that open up new avenues for storytelling and visual engagement.
Wallace’s sculptureswhile distinct from her paintingsshare the same essential qualities of light, color, and emotional resonance. They embody her belief that art is not confined to any one material or form but is instead about the expression of inner states and the creation of meaningful connections with the viewer. As she delves deeper into the world of sculpture, her figures become more than just aesthetic objectsthey are thought-provoking, narrative-driven pieces that reflect Wallace’s ongoing exploration of hybridity, marginality, and the intersection of the natural and artificial.
This expanding body of work signifies Wallace’s ongoing transformation as an artist. Her refusal to be confined by the expectations of a single artistic tradition or medium speaks to her belief in the necessity of innovation and the pursuit of new forms of expression. As her ceramic sculptures gain recognition and attention in their own right, Wallace continues to show that her creative journey is one of perpetual reinventionalways evolving, always reaching for something new, but never losing touch with the core principles that have guided her work from the start.
Wallace’s growing visibility in critical circles reflects her expanding influence within the art world. Her recent exhibition, Midnight Feast at The MAC in Belfast, garnered attention for its exploration of nocturnal imagery, community rituals, and the inner light that shines through darkness. This show, which combined both paintings and early sculptural experiments, exemplified Wallace’s ability to bridge different forms of artistic expression while maintaining a unified vision. Critics and audiences alike noted the exhibition's cohesion and ambition, cementing Wallace’s status as an artist whose work resonates deeply on both a formal and emotional level.
While recognition of her work is gratifying, Wallace’s focus remains on the art itself, its potential for growth, transformation, and connection. For Wallace, the journey of creating and sharing art is not about seeking accolades but about the opportunity to engage with others, to explore new ideas, and to push the boundaries of what art can achieve. Her commitment to the work remains steadfast, and she continues to champion the role of art in fostering dialogue, both within the art world and with the wider public.
