Midnight Feast

Midnight Feast is a major institutional solo exhibition, held in the Tall Gallery of The Mac (2023). The works on display (paintings, sculpture, collage) recontextualised ideas relating to landscape and classical mythology, repositioning visual tropes within a back garden in West Belfast. Wallace's work spotlights marginal narratives from the years of conflict in the North and her practice makes visual the surreal and the banal existence of life in an emergency housing estate at that time. While so-called 'troubles art' privileges a masculine reading of public space and the theatre of war, Wallace is concerned with recovering cultural identities that are pictured within an 'aesthetics of smallness'. This relates to the experiences of mothers and children, confined to the home and back garden during the conflict. Wallace's art works articulate a surreal alternative landscape which contrasts with the normative depiction of bleak urban spaces. Midnight Feast offers a dreaming space of shadows, fruit, body parts and bizarre garden ornaments. There is joy and laughter in this space and there is also anxiety and dread.