A COLLECTION of paintings by Ennistymon artist Grace Wallis is currently on display in the Gallery Café in Gort.
The exhibition entitled, ‘There they were dignified, invisible’ has been open to the public since February 16 and will remain open until April 16.
Grace an oil painter based in North Clare first became interested in art as a child. With both of her parents being artists, Grace was surrounded by art from a young age. She told The Clare Echo that some of her earliest memories are of her spending afternoons sketching with her mother.
Although Grace grew up in a family of creatives, she never believed that art was something that she would pursue as a career. This belief led her to step away from art as a teen, but she eventually found her way back to the easel after starting an undergraduate degree in film and finding that this path was not for her. =“I dropped out because I didn’t like working with a group of people and not having autonomy over my own projects.”
At a loss for what next step to take, Grace decided to enrol in a portfolio course in Galway Technological Institute as art was always a subject she had an interest in. While completing the course, Grace fell back in love with art and went on to study in the Limerick School of Art and Design, specialising in painting.
“The reason I was drawn back to art is because we spent so much time drawing and looking at things, this makes you a lot more engaged with where you actually are and with the things around you and I really liked how it made me see things”, Grace explained.
Grace’s current exhibition is a collection of paintings from Covid times and the surrounding years. The paintings depict a mixture of childhood memories, scenes inspired by the Covid-19 lockdown, as well as some brief moments she encountered while on an artist’s residency in Barcelona.
At the time when these paintings were created, Grace was finding her way back into the painting. She says that she can see a progression in her artistry through these paintings.
“Because I was still in college then I was still learning how to paint, or how I wanted to paint and that was also a big part of some of those pieces. I was just kind of understanding the medium.”
“My work now is quite different than from what’s in that show, and I suppose it is interesting to look back,” she concluded.
