SOTP: Thanks for coming along to do this, the next in the series of these painters' lockdown interviews. As well as wanting to talk to you about your practice, I've also been communicating with you about things that have been coming into my mind at a distance, in all of our isolations, and one of these has been John Berger's beautiful readings done in 1999 in an Underground Tube tunnel in London... particularly ‘Can You Hear Me, in the Darkness?’ Through this he evokes the prehistoric Chauvet Caves, and what time and distance meant for people then, the cave paintings' meanings and so on.
For some reason, knowing your garden studio from talks you have done, I kept thinking of the paint marks you leave on the red bricks. It's not unlike what we're familiar with from Francis Bacon's studio walls. It also made me reflect on the structuring of your paintings, which for me, sometimes, take on a feeling of the marks and gestures we see in prehistoric paintings, particularly in their aged state as they present themselves to us now.
Anyway, you've said that you had a listen to it too, and it did have a strong resonance?
The studio wall
LW: It did indeed, thanks for sharing that. I loved the intimacy in Berger’s voice as he spoke in the tunnel, remarking, ‘..claustrophobia is a question of context.’ I thought that was pertinent to lockdown living, as was his central theme: what it might mean to live ‘time’ differently.
We are certainly living time differently at the moment. Lockdown is a time of epic nostalgia. Nostalgia comes from the Greek ‘nostos’ (homecoming) plus ‘algos’ (pain) and the term was first used in the 17th century to describe crippling homesickness experienced by Swiss soldiers. Ironically, nostalgia was thought to be a virus that could spread. To eliminate the risk of epidemic, soldiers were threatened with being buried alive.
We are experiencing a collective and immense longing (pubs, cinema, gigs, sports events, a work space, extended family) coupled with the realisation that perhaps we can never go back, that things will be changed forever. I was reading Mark Fisher’s description of our society (pre-Covid) as one shaped by the loss of loss. Our advancing technologies support cultural trends towards archiving, reiteration, repetition. Imagine the replicator machine in the Star Trek t.v. show as the ultimate example of the loss of loss! But now we are experiencing an unprecedented sense of loss that produces a kind of culture shock. Perhaps we are living through a turning point in history.
My work has dealt with time and history, but on a local level. I’ve been working through oral accounts of events, places and activities relating to this particular piece of land in Northern Ireland. I love Eavan Boland’s description of Irish temporality as history versus the past; history is for heroes while the past is a place of whispers, shadows and vanishings. I’m interested in the past.
SOTP: The more that I've thought about this, the painted wooden objects that you've sometimes incorporated with your recent paintings kind of take on something of a totemic or talismanic quality, I think. I felt this before when I’ve seen your work, but couldn't quite articulate why, but I'm also thinking about a recent tweet that I came across about prehistoric painted stones.
Can you tell us a bit about how you see the wooden painted objects operating alongside your paintings?
Cavehill arrangement in studio
LW: Those painted stones are great! Perhaps you are responding to the fact that I’m using found wood/ objects that possess a kind of patina and hold a sense of their own past? These things have a very ad hoc, random quality that I like. I use them as a way to help me make and unmake the painting. So much of compositional development is about finding the internal sense of a work. The 3-D pieces are a way of introducing non-sense. And this is helpful to me because I need to change the energy in the studio sometimes and feel that I can play. There is a lot of masochistic language around the practice of painting. The activity is canonically described as a struggle that involves pain and requires sacrifices. This takes us back to Boland’s history of heroes, and I want to take a side-step away from the heroic in painting. Painting is also the most intense pleasure. Painters become addicted to colour. I often think of nudging, tickling or cajoling a painting along its path. Positioning shonky, discarded objects around a work-in-progress introduces playful prompts and a way of unravelling any over-wrought intentions in the surface of the painting.
Pond Life/ oil on canvas, found wood, pine wood, acrylic paint/ 44 x 38 cm/ 2019
courtesy of the artist, photography by Simon Mills
SOTP: Back to your studio set up- like Chris and Fiona who did the last interview, you have also valued the situation of having a home studio, in your case in the garden. In what other ways has this influenced your paintings? I'm thinking here particularly of the wonderful, very colourful, collages you were making a few years ago, and also the paintings that featured abandoned toys in the undergrowth. How has this work, and the work you have continued to make in your studio, been influenced by your studio setting?
Acrylic and collage on paper
courtesy of the artist
courtesy of the artist
LW: Highly influential I would say. My studio has really changed my practice in the last 8 years- both the way that I look at things, and the things that I choose to look at. I am literally painting things that are close to home. So when my daughter was younger and the house was full of her toys I would use them in still life contexts and think of them as sentient creatures crawling through the back garden.
And this relates to looking, which has changed in my practice over the years. Sometimes when I am stuck I look out of the studio window to paint what I see in the garden. A sense of place has become fundamental to my work. I spent my childhood in West Belfast and now my studio is in North Belfast so the city, its spaces and stories have soaked into my work. It’s landscape painting of a sort, I guess. But I am more interested in Belfast’s edgelands, as Stephen Prince describes it, ‘..society’s overlooked and often unsupervised nooks and crannies.’
SOTP: As well as your painting practice and teaching at Belfast School of Art, you have been involved in the organisation and curation of exhibitions. We did one together called ‘How the Image Echoes’ recently, and now there is the show you have been working on for a while now, ‘Penumbra’, at the F.E. McWilliam Gallery. I think ‘Penumbra’ is full of fascinating elements, not least the angle you have taken in presenting an all female line- up. The works are a very strong representation of what is interesting in Irish painting just now. Can you tell us a bit more about the motivations around putting on this show, and what you think it reveals about painting here today?
LW: The curator/ director of the gallery Dr. Riann Coulter and I worked on the show for 2 years, and curation is a lovely way to swap the solitude of the studio for collaboration and sharing ideas. I think of ‘Penumbra’ as a mapping of three different types of space in painting: landscape (Sinead Aldridge, Hannah Casey Brogan and myself); interior or dreaming space (Sarah Dwyer, Fiona Finnegan, Alison Pilkington); the space of paint itself, materially (Susan Connolly, Yasmine Robinson). Across these three axes, the exhibition aimed to map a contemporary Irish identity. That identity was female.
Riann and I had planned a symposium linked to the exhibition, that was unfortunately cancelled due to Covid-19. Our aim was to expose the institutional marginalisation of Irish female painting across museum exhibitions, collections and art history. The situation is particularly pernicious here in the North, where painting per se has been largely overlooked in reviews of visual culture since the 1980s. Female painting in the North is therefore doubly occluded. It has fallen out of history but it’s there, in the shadows and vanishings.
SOTP: And what about your own work in the show? What were the main influences and ideas that flowed through the paintings, and how did this affect the way you decided to install the work, in a way that could be read as an inter-related hanging?
Glengoland Crescent/ oil on canvas, pine wood, acrylic paint/ 76 x 112 cm 2019
courtesy of the artist, photography by Simon Mills
LW: I made a series of new works for ‘Penumbra’ that looked at mirroring compositional elements within and across works. I was thinking about the idea of the doppelganger, the double of a living person who is an omen of death. In Irish this is known as ‘the fetch’. A conversation with Belfast poet Padraig Regan took me to a wonderful poem by Ciaran Carson called ‘The Fetch Length’:
‘The fetch of a wave is the distance it travels, you said,
from where it is born at sea to where it founders to shore.’
This felt right because my paintings for the show dealt with local bodies of water, from Half Moon Lake in Lenadoon housing estate to the Glen River and ornamental ponds on local housing estates.
A type of mirroring then started to take hold across the exhibition itself. It was very curious. There was the suggestion of a figure in black in Sinead’s painting ‘Headstone’ which echoed with Fiona’s hooded woman in ‘How Vacantly You Gaze At Me’. And then there was a sort of ellipse motif that recurred across several works – a half moon shape or arch. Dr Cherie Driver (who has written for the exhibition publication), Riann and I spotted this during studio visits, and we arrived at the title for the exhibition.
SOTP: What have generally been the influences on you as a painter over the years? Who has been interesting to you over the last while in painting, and are there historical painters that you look to? And do you think of, or react to, anything in your painting in terms of what you might be watching or reading?
LW: I got a couple of good steers recently and they appear in my Lockdown List:
Karin Mamma Andersson; Dana Schutz; Tal R; Mairead O’hEocha; Raoul De Keyser; Walter Sickert; Gwen John; Manet; Degas; Matisse; Bonnard; May Guinness; Evie Hone’s landscapes; Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh; David Crone.
Any time I see Vuillard in a museum collection I am struck by his strangeness and I think he has a lot to offer contemporary painters. I think Phoebe Unwin and Torey Thornton are doing interesting things with compositional space. I love Catherine McWilliams’ painting ‘Girls on Motorcycles’ from 1973 which makes me think of the fantastic painter Helen Verhoeven. I love Ilse de Hollander’s beautiful, sparse landscapes. I always enjoy the playfulness of Richard Tuttle and Amy Sillman.
I’ve recently watched the films ‘Midsommar’ (thanks Eimear) and ‘Odd Man Out’, a noir classic which was partially filmed in West Belfast.
I’m currently trying to juggle four books, which is three too many:
‘The Little Friend’ by Donna Tartt
‘Black Magic and Bogeymen’ by Richard Jenkins (thanks Susan)
‘Ghost Haunted Land’ by Declan Long
‘A Year in the Country, Wandering Through Spectral Fields’ by Stephen Prince
Many of these books and films are all linked by the question: what happens to a community that experiences violence or violent upheaval? W.J.T. Mitchell talks about the possibility of a community or country being subject to a collective madness and uses contemporary America as an example. I think, at the minute, the world is doing a remarkable job of staying sane.
I’ve been listening to collected oral histories of Belfast’s hills:
There are powerful images in those accounts. For instance, May McCready’s that describes Belfast brick-making, where bricks were fired in large outdoor kilns for several days. When they were removed, displaced people would sleep in the cooling ovens and emerge covered in the red dust. On Cavehill, early settlers built a crannog (a type of water dwelling) on the lake which is now the flamingo pond at the zoo. That’s just brilliant! At Carnmoney Hill there are souterrain (man-made tunnels) perhaps 2,000 years old.
SOTP: Finally, what is round the corner for you? Are you working on a body of work in particular, or is there anything about this lockdown situation we find ourselves in which is providing you with a different way of approaching your work?
Studio detail
LW: Yes, absolutely. This takes me back to the idea of looking. At the start of the lockdown I set myself the task of drawing Cavehill. I sat on a kitchen chair in the back garden and made several studies across a number of days. It became routine and perhaps a way of finding my place and a sense of calm through ‘long looking’. The writer Haruki Murakami talks about the effect of routine when he is working on a book: “The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism.”
In the studio I’ve assembled random scraps of wood in a sort-of portrait of Cavehill. Now I am unravelling my long-looking through a series of acrylic and collage works on paper. I’ve propped the works beside objects and pieces of painted wood in the studio to extend the idea of a fragmentary, bizarre landscape.
I’m thinking about the possibility of a mountain people. They could be pre- or post-colonial. I imagine them living in the forests and the souterrains (like John Berger in the Underground!) So now the acrylic collages of Cavehill’s trees, bushes and gorse are quite anthropomorphic, maybe a little eerie. I can see a similarity with those older toy collages you mentioned. At this point I am ready to start considering the next series of paintings – perhaps a larger scale. I don’t know how or when this work will be exhibited. It’s enough for me to be making again and I am very lucky to have the studio to do that.
The Super Furry Animals sang about a sneezing mountain people – a very Dana Schutz image! The lyrics touch on some of the things I’m thinking about, and it’s always good to finish with a song…
Thanks very much for inviting me along to SOTP – I’ve really enjoyed the chat, but I do miss the buns. I hope everyone is re-united with studio spaces and paintings soon.
SOTP: Yes, see you when we all get out of our painting caves, blinking into the bright new dawn!
SOTP: Yes, see you when we all get out of our painting caves, blinking into the bright new dawn!
Louise Wallace is a Belfast painter who continues to live and work in the city. She received a First Class honours degree in Fine Art from Belfast School of Art (2002) and went on to complete her PhD there (2006) having been awarded the Vice Chancellor’s Research Studentship. Recent solo exhibitions include The Glutted Look of Clouds, Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast (2016) and Chasing Ghosts, Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast (2005). Recent group exhibitions include Penumbra, F.E. McWilliam Gallery, Banbridge (2020); How The Image Echoes 1 & 2 Ulster University Gallery (2020) and PS² Gallery, Belfast (2019); Houses Are Like Birds, Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast (2019), Fully Awake, House For An Art Lover, Glasgow (2017) Winter Open, Rua Red Gallery, Dublin (2014), Convergence 2014, 3C Creative Mall, Bejing (2014), Intimate Revolution, Siemens Art Space, Beijing (2012), Contemporary Art in Northern Ireland, Parliament Buildings, Belfast (2011), 15th Annual Juried Exhibition, Soho20 Gallery New York (2010, curated by Phong Bui).
Wallace was awarded the British Airways Student Travel Prize (2001) and the Support for The Individual Artist award, Arts Council of Northern Ireland (2007, 2005). Her work is in the public collections of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Boyle Civic Collection, Sligo. Her essay ‘Who Killed Marthe Bonnard? Madness, Morbidity and Pierre Bonnard’s The Bath’ was published in the Journal of Contemporary Painting (2018).
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