Wallace was born in the Midwest in October of 1954. She was educated in Milwaukee Area Technical College, the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, George Brown University in Toronto and Colorado Women’s College in Denver.

The aesthetic of Wallace’s work lays in its silence. She has incited a solitary transaction between spectator and painting, a private and intimate meeting, encouraging an undisturbed absorption of image. Using the canvas as a single plane, stressing the two-dimensional character of painting and rejecting illusions of depth and gestural brushwork, Wallace applies colour in blocks that span the entire surface, suggesting that the composition may be yet a detail of a larger field. The architecture of the canvas is divided laterally and horizontally into zones of colour of close and contrasting tonal relationships, using predominately dry earth tones of siennas, sages and ochres that impart an illusion of transparency and translucence in surface.

Veils of colour lend mysteriousness to Wallace’s work, accented at times by an oriental symbol or a typeset letter hidden or boldly displayed within the composition, as if it hints in secret code to a large message. These letters are placed deliberately as a focal point to exalt mind above the banal contingencies and trivializations of social life to a place more spiritual, contemplative and intimate.