Midnight Feast

Location

Country: Other
City: at framer

'Midnight Feast' appears at first to be a surreal, abstract scene full of floating natural forms painted in lush purples and pinks. However, the image is rooted in personal memories of the conflict in Northern Ireland as experienced by the artist, particularly as it spilled over into the private gardens of the newly-built housing estates of West Belfast, where she grew up. Partly born out of a sense that much Northern Irish conflict art is highly masculine, often militaristic in its depiction of everyday life amid conflict, Wallace’s painting presents a radically different view of this historical period. What emerges is a vision shaped by her own memories, that is wistfully nostalgic but also deeply menacing. 'Midnight Feast' transports us into the enclosed back-gardens of these estates on Belfast’s edges, where many people, including Wallace’s family, relocated in order to escape the dangers of inner-city life at the time – and where mothers would keep a watchful eye on their children as they played. Depicting a tightly-compressed landscape, the painting’s dream-like atmosphere and assortment of human-like shapes, brightly-coloured fruit, animated shrubs, and classically-inspired garden ornaments create a vision that is alluring and full of hidden threats – a reference to how, even in these enclosed sanctuaries, the threat of danger remained constant.

Louise Wallace is a painter, writer and educator. She is the winner of the 2024 Oil Award, Jackson's Art Prize and in 2022 was shortlisted for the BEEP Painting Prize. In 2020, she was longlisted for the John Moore’s Painting Prize. She is lecturer in painting at Belfast School of Art, where she completed her PhD in 2005. She is the recipient of several bursaries and Arts Council awards and has exhibited her paintings nationally and internationally. Her latest exhibition, Midnight Feast, was held at The Mac in Belfast in 2023, and she has exhibited at the SoHo20 gallery (New York), Siemens Art Space (Beijing), RUA Red (Dublin), and the Fenderesky gallery (Belfast). Her work is in several private and public collections including the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Ulster University, and the Boyle Civic Collection, Sligo. As well as painting, Wallace curates exhibitions and publishes articles on painting. In 2020, she co-curated and exhibited in Penumbra, a survey of contemporary Irish female painting at the F.E. McWilliam Gallery (2020) and in 2023 she was co-curator of the retrospective Catherine McWilliams 1961 – 2021 at the F.E. McWilliam Gallery. Paintings from the Midnight Feast series are included in the 2023 British Council journal Difficult Conversations.

Places

Subjects

Materials & Techniques

Artist

Louise Wallace

Title

Midnight Feast

Date

2022

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

height: 90cm width: 75cm depth: 8cm

Acquisition

Purchased from the artist, December 2024

Provenance

The artist; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection, 18 December 2024

GAC number

19347