Louise Wallace
@louisewallaceartist
Statement:
Pond (After) Life is a strange soup of ideas. The work is informed by historical landscape painting, in particular the sublime encounter with nature. In this sense, the work relates to the BEEP theme that ‘nothing has changed’ because the painter’s interest in the landscape has a long tradition. At the same time ‘everything has changed’ because this work applies the Romantic Sublime to a garden pond on a housing estate, treating it as a vision of paradise. The wooden arm with ‘pond ornaments’ references the bizarre bric-a-brac that often surrounds garden ponds. This painting is part of an ongoing series of works, which restages classical genre painting such as The Deluge in the back garden. I want to shrink the art historical epic down to the scale of the domestic and democratise so-called high art ideologies.
As a painter based in the North of Ireland, the work addresses ideas tied to this particular place and the tradition of Irish landscape painting. Cultural identity in the North is a curious amalgam of various traditions, always tied to the land. In this sense, nothing has changed. However, everything has changed here post-Brexit as one’s geographical, philosophical and political relationship to the land and borders is subject to constant debate. I don’t think of my practice as political, but I do hope it speaks to a contemporary, critical sense of ‘Irishness’.
@louisewallaceartist
Statement:
Pond (After) Life is a strange soup of ideas. The work is informed by historical landscape painting, in particular the sublime encounter with nature. In this sense, the work relates to the BEEP theme that ‘nothing has changed’ because the painter’s interest in the landscape has a long tradition. At the same time ‘everything has changed’ because this work applies the Romantic Sublime to a garden pond on a housing estate, treating it as a vision of paradise. The wooden arm with ‘pond ornaments’ references the bizarre bric-a-brac that often surrounds garden ponds. This painting is part of an ongoing series of works, which restages classical genre painting such as The Deluge in the back garden. I want to shrink the art historical epic down to the scale of the domestic and democratise so-called high art ideologies.
As a painter based in the North of Ireland, the work addresses ideas tied to this particular place and the tradition of Irish landscape painting. Cultural identity in the North is a curious amalgam of various traditions, always tied to the land. In this sense, nothing has changed. However, everything has changed here post-Brexit as one’s geographical, philosophical and political relationship to the land and borders is subject to constant debate. I don’t think of my practice as political, but I do hope it speaks to a contemporary, critical sense of ‘Irishness’.
Pond (After) Life
44 x 38cm
oil on canvas, found wood, pine wood, acrylic paint
2020
44 x 38cm
oil on canvas, found wood, pine wood, acrylic paint
2020