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- Grace Wallis
Grace
Wallis
A Walk in The Moon Garden
“Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.” T.S Elliot, Burnt Norton
Welcome to Grace Wallis’ garden, a garden of images proposing botany of a new land, a zoology for imagined beings. Taking a critical look at humanist classification present in much western Natural history and deciding this way of narrating the natural doesn’t leave much room for the imagination, she reframes the subject matter in the style of sacred art. Influenced by the art of Persian miniature painting for its lyricism and Fra Angelico’s frescos for their reverence, her work is as much a shrine to the natural world as it is an attempt to retell its story in poetics as opposed to scientificity. This poetics extends not just as far as individual works, but also how the works play off against each other. Allowing the paintings to be in a symbiosis which mirrors ecological interrelationships, Grace finds a space where art and ecology can be in conversation.