“Sunlight on my love’s elbow, sunlight in the kettle’s steam.” Sarah Fuller-Wallis, Ruby Wallis, and Grace Wallis.
Main Gallery and Redcouch Gallery
6 February – 14 March 2026
As the first exhibition in CHG&S’s 2026 programme, this collection of work introduces a year shaped by attention, resilience, and the traces of lived experience. The title holds a small, domestic image, but it opens onto much larger questions: how we move through time, how places affect us, and how memory, care, fear, and repair sit inside the everyday. Bringing together three artists from the same family, the exhibition sets a quietly powerful tone for the programme, one grounded in close observation and the emotional weather of ordinary life.
Artists: Sarah Fuller-Wallis (www.sarahfuller.net), Ruby Wallis (www.rubywallis.com), Grace Wallis (@gracewallisart)
‘Sunlight on my love’s elbow, sunlight in the kettle’s steam.’ presents the work of three artists from the same family.
New and existing work created for this exhibition incorporates a diversity of practices including lens-based media, installation, painting, printmaking and drawing.
Grace’s series of paintings: 2026 ‘As Nameless as if We’d Never Been Here At All’
depict fictional landscapes that merge real or remembered environments with symbolic motifs. These landscapes function as psychological spaces, reflecting emotional states of transition, absence, and unresolved feeling.
Sarah focuses on the present, bringing awareness and attention to suspended moments of time when she finds herself either waiting or in transit.
Documenting these in sketchbooks through drawing and writing from 2020 -2025.
Ruby’s video ‘Into the Edgelands’ 2023 and prints from ‘A Woman Walks, Alone at Night with a Camera’ 2022 stem from an interest in the experiential and the study of how places make us feel or behave, and emphasise the act of walking at night as a woman. Each artist employs a haptic awareness of sound, touch, light, movement and emotional state to make their work.
‘As Nameless as if We’d Never Been Here At All’
“Now, you know the reason that I really love the stars – is that we cannot hurt them. We can't burn, we can't melt them or make them overflow. We can't flood them, or blow them up. Or turn them out. But we are reaching for them. We are reaching for them
And, ah yes, the moon and the stars are up there. Like acquaintances, that we always meant to befriend. Yes, I meant to learn their names. But for various reasons having to do with lack of time – and lack of ambition – I never did do that. And they remained up in the sky, as nameless as if we'd never been here at all” - Laurie Anderson
This series of work takes its name from a track by Laurie Anderson and the Kronos quartet called ‘Nothing Left but their names’. The year of 2025 was bookended by loss and marked at its midpoint by a major car accident. In the spring, I made an attempt to affirm my vitality by going on a solo cycling trip across Europe. At one point in the journey I found myself in a campsite on the edge of a forest on the outskirts of a small town called Montargis.
I was waiting there to catch a flight, waiting for the rain to pass. I met other people there who were waiting too, for different reasons, and one man who got tired of waiting. These encounters form the basis of the six compositions in this show. Rather than approaching these themes through literal storytelling, I work through symbol and metaphor. Meaning emerges gradually through the process of making. The paintings depict fictional landscapes that merge real or remembered environments with symbolic motifs. These landscapes function as psychological spaces, reflecting emotional states of transition, absence, and unresolved feeling.
Ruby Wallis: Into the Edgelands (2023)
4-channel video with stereo sound and photographic prints from the series A Woman Walks Alone at Night with a Camera (2022)
This work was made in the moments when I left the house where my daughter sleeps and stepped into the night, seeking a way to connect with the world beyond the merry-go-round of domestic life. The pavement under my feet glistens in the rain. The cat, a constant companion, the ultimate night walker. Streetlights spill over leaves, flowers beckoning in the dark. Shadows shift.
My phone becomes a roving eye, almost a predator, moving in close to plants, textures, and light. Headlights cut through the darkness, streaking across walls. I brush the grass, feel the edges of leaves under my fingers. The night—plants, shadows, light, sound—folds around me. I’m aware of my body and possible dangers. Pixelated frames, glitches, and the materiality of the image itself.
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Sarah Fuller/Wallis: Suspended Moments.
The work presented here shares a selection of drawings and writings recorded over the past five years. As a carer for my mother, I often find myself in situations where time seems to stand still. Undefined intervals of time, without an idea of the duration, several minutes or several hours, can sometimes be frustrating and challenging.
To reclaim a creative space for myself, these moments have become my active zone of interest. I see these as negative spaces in time. In drawing, negative space is the empty space that surrounds an object; it is an active space and an essential part of a composition. The challenge for me in this process is to actively engage with my surroundings, bringing awareness and attention to every sound, sensation, object, person, or place I am witness to in that brief amount of time.
It is a playful way of reclaiming creative time and an act of resistance to the dominance of idling scrolling. Another important rule of the game is to accept everything as it is in all its imperfection without trying to change anything.
Artists Biographies
Ruby Wallis
Ruby Wallis is a visual artist whose work has been shown internationally, exploring themes of place, memory, and perception. Recent exhibitions include Between Dog and Wolf and A Space for Lismore 2025 at Lismore Castle Arts, and A R C H P E L A G O at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin.
Publications featuring her work include Fantasy Island, Rotten Books, The Journal of Artistic Research, The New Yorker, British Journal of Photography, and Winter Papers (volumes 6 and 7). Her work will also appear in Source Photographic Review in 2026. Collections include the Arts Council of Ireland, the Rochester Art Centre (USA), and the National University of Ireland. She is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.
Ruby holds a PhD from the National College of Art and Design and lectures at the Burren College of Art.
Sarah Fuller-Wallis
Sarah Fuller is a visual artist, illustrator, puppeteer and founding member of Dog and String Theatre from 1995 -2019.
She holds a BA Honours. in Textile Design from Central St. Martins College of Art and Design, London. And an MA in Visual Arts Practice from IADT, Dublin. She is an Associate Artist with Helium, and on the Artist’s Panel with Kids’ Own Publishing Partnership.
She is the recipient of several awards including a YPCE Bursary, and an Arts Participation Bursary from the Arts Council.
In 2024 she was awarded a residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre from Children’s Books Ireland and Clare Arts Office.
She is committed to making work for young audiences and has many years of experience working as an artist in schools and health care contexts with people of all ages and abilities.
Grace Wallis
Grace Wallis is a visual artist currently based in Kinsale County Cork. She graduated from the Limerick School of Art and Design in 2023 with a First Class Honours.
She was the recipient of the Collector General Purchase Award, the Arts Council Agility Award and has had her work purchased for collections in the Limerick City Gallery, the OPW and the TUS Permanent Collection. She has been involved in several collaborative projects, including a blended research program for a quarry regeneration project in Leiria, Portugal.
She is a member of studio 8 Galway and an Associate Member of Sample Studios in Cork.
