Madeleine Cruise is an emerging Australian artist who lives and works in Ballarat Victoria, Australia.  Her art practice uses drawing, collage and painting to explore everyday rituals and their contribution to personal identity. Inspired by connections with place and the role of memory, Madeleine combines still life and landscape imagery to create expressive compositions that hover between abstraction and representation.

Madeleine’s landscapes are concerned with the emotional understanding of place and explore how painting and memory can operate as processes of connection. Reductive, layered and highly coloured paintings focus on the visual and textural signifiers of place and allow for an instinctual and subjective interpretation. Madeleine’s interior paintings are multi faceted compositions that represent the sequence of everyday life and as such seek to elevate and make rituals of ordinary domestic practices. 

Madeleine studied a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a major in Painting at the National Art School Sydney.  As a student of the Reg Row Art Scholarship she graduated in 2009 with First Class Honours and the Fraser Studios residency prize.

Madeleine's ongoing practice has been supported through studio residencies with Firstdraft Sydney, The Bundanon Trust, The Banff Centre Canada and Marrickville Garage. Madeleine has exhibited in solo and group shows in Australia and Canada and has been a finalist in the Muswellbrook, Waterhouse and Mosman art prizes as well as the Lloyd Rees Memorial Youth Art Award, National Still life award and NSW Parliament En Plein Air art Prize. In 2017 Madeleine was a finalist in the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship.

In 2013 Madeleine founded NANA contemporary art space in Newcastle, a not for profit art gallery that she directed for three years.

Since relocating to Victoria in 2019 Madeleine has undertaken collaborative projects with Ballarat based ceramicist Ruby Pilven and mounted a major exhibition, The Golden Pantomime at the Art Gallery Ballarat in 2020 / 2021.

Madeleine’s work is part of private and public collections in Australia, America and the UK  including Artbank Australia.