Artist of the Month, August 2024 - Louise Wallace

Louise Wallace is a painter, writer and educator. She completed her PhD in 2005 at Belfast School of Art where she currently works as a lecturer in painting. Louise has exhibited her paintings nationally and internationally including the SoHo20 gallery (New York), Siemens Art Space (Beijing), RUA Red (Dublin) and a major solo exhibition, Midnight Feast, at The MAC (Belfast) 2023. Her work is informed by historical landscape painting. In particular, the sublime encounter with nature, which addresses ideas tied to cultural identity in Northern Ireland.

The Black Bungalow is part of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Collection. It depicts a painted childhood memory of a house in Glengoland housing estate in West Belfast circa 1977. The estate was built in the 1970s to accommodate the migration of catholic families across the city during the conflict and was one of a number of emergency initiatives at that time. The imagery is saturated with the same dread and energy that characterised family life at that time of conflict. The artist’s focus on the back garden is a way of dealing with the land/landscape through the subversion of master narratives.

Visit artscouncil-ni.org/art-collection to find out more about the Arts Council's Collection.