The Old Butcher’s Shop Gallery - Ballarat

05.02.22 - 27.02.22

This series of work from Madeleine Cruise is an intimate and reflective portrayal of the experience that has been ‘living with Covid’ in her home town of Ballarat.

Made over a two year period, Creature Comforts documents the artist’s living and working environment across a range of mediums. Keeping within the 5km radius of travel restrictions the artist’s local landscape of Black hill is a reoccurring motif as is the domestic space, which became an imaginative sanctuary.

Working within parameters Madeleine has focused her gaze and like the title suggests found solace in habitual practices. Newly adopted techniques of embroidery and carving feature in this exhibition as cathartic processes that served to not only extend upon aesthetic themes in the artist’s body of work but calm the mind.

A limited number of works from this exhibition are still available for purchase. Please see the STOCK ROOM for details.

MADELEINE CRUISE & RUBY PILVEN

Art Gallery of Ballarat

1 August 2020 - 7 February 2021

For Ballarat-based artists Madeleine Cruise and Ruby Pilven, the process of creating artworks is as important as the artworks themselves – it is a daily necessity much like preparing and eating a meal.

For this exhibition the artists have come together at the dining table to tell the stories of their lives – set with a glittering array of vessels and painted objects the table becomes a stage where domestic theatre plays out.

The golden pantomime is a showcase of artworks produced by Cruise and Pilven individually and in response to each other’s work. Pilven’s porcelain and stoneware ceramic pieces are based on both historical and imagined forms that act as story tellers and props from domestic and natural spaces. Likewise, Cruise’s interior paintings feature table ware and decorative objects that celebrate the ritual in everyday life.

With the common theme of still life as spectacle the artists have also made a series of collaborative works. These include lyrically painted ceramic pieces and small theatrical sets that reference the architecture of the artists shared home Ballarat.

From the artist, Madeleine Cruise:

‘In preparation for my exhibition with Ruby I have focused my attention on two common themes in our work, the vessel and our home in Ballarat. With a pre existing practice in still life I have worked to develop my own vessel vocabulary that draws on colours and shapes from Ruby’s work and symbolizes my experiences of relocating to Ballarat from NSW in 2019.

I have used my painting practice to ‘settle into’ and appreciate my new home so the work includes both personal narratives and observational images. Scenes from the Ballarat botanical gardens and Sturt Street scape are reoccurring in this series, as is the use of ornamentation and colour that I have appropriated from Ballarat’s floral displays and architecture. Punctuating these compositions are images of vessels, abstract shapes and animal motifs that tell stories about surviving winter, new friendships, identity crisis and environmental concerns.

The presence of gold and patterns of treasure is a re occurring motif developed in this body of work that likens hunting for gold to soul searching. Like Ruby’s use of gold lustre the presence of Gold in my paintings and prints acknowledge the history and environment of our studio practice in the former gold rush town of Ballarat.’

A solo Exhibition

Dungog Contemporary 23 August - 23 September 2018

Theatre Of Objects is the latest body of work from Newcastle based artist Madeleine Cruise. Like much of Madeleine’s recent work, this series continues to investigate the relationship between art and life and the meditative role of painting.

With a new found appreciation for the Still Life genre, Theatre of Objects is Madeleine’s most representational series to date and demonstrates an artistic shift in her practice. However, unlike traditional still life paintings, the vessels depicted in Madeleine’s works are far from inanimate and appear more like protagonists on a painterly stage. Attributed with character and emotion, the everyday household items enact conundrums, vent frustrations, debate and console one another. As such, Madeleine uses painting to chart emotional terrain and gives physicality to internal frustrations. Painting title’s such as: Winners keep on winning and Keep your enemies close, are examples of the social framework and internal dialogue that the artist has used as the thematic basis for this series of work.

Theatre of Objects reveals the artists’ appreciation of the home as a sanctuary and an important source of identity. Based on the interiors of her own home and garden Madeleine has carefully composed paintings that re evaluate the status of common objects and domestic tasks and aligned them with the status of ritual.

18/08/2017 - 28/08/2017

Gaffa Gallery Sydney

Ex Voto: An offering made in fulfillment of a vow.

We are pulled out of our homes to travel once in a while, drawn by people, places, lovers and circumstance into other countries and cultures. One of the places that we come across the most difference from our homebound lives is in the visual manifestation of faith in architecture, visual iconography and ceremony in religious and cultural events in countries outside of our own. Ex Voto expresses the echo and aftershock that these moments leave on our lives when we return home.

This exhibition is also about the role of ritual and habit in everyday life and the way these practices contribute to personal identity and purpose. Cruise’s conceptual starting point is her experience of religious and cultural festivities abroad, however the works really begin in the contrast between a sacred practice and a very secular one. Through painting, Cruise raises the value of domestic chores and daily habits to the status of important cultural rituals.

In the development of these works Cruise explores the role of decorative systems in attributing value to objects, the role of the artist in assigning meaning via the decision of subject matter, as well of the role of space and how it can be a means for people to connect with their environment.

Ex Voto is about giving holiness to routine, to community engagement, aesthetic orderliness and ornamentation. Carefully ordered interiors are sanctums, leisurely gardens are retreats.

Still life is a devotional practice and landscapes are holy sites.

Oliver Hensel Brown

Work from the Hawkesbury River collection was made made during and after an artist residency on the Hawkesbury River of New South Wales in 2015. 

Madeleine was awarded the Bammy Memorial Residency by Sydney gallery Marrickville Garage in October 2015, when she spent a month living and working at Mangrove Creek. Working en plein air, often on a canoe, as well as in the farmhouse studio, Madeleine developed a series of paintings and drawings that continued to evolve for twelve months.

Works from this period were shown in The Bammy Exhibition at Marrickville Garage's gallery in April 2016. Other select works were chosen as finalists in the 2016 New South Wales En Plein Air Landscape Prize and the 2017 Lloyd Rees Memorial Youth Art Prize. 

11/02/2015 – 28/02/2015

NANA Contemporary Art Space Newcastle

When I walked into Madeleine’s Islington studio, at the back of her house looking over a garden (giant jacaranda tree with chooks beyond), Candy reminded me of a saying: first there was the word, and the word was replaced by flesh, and it never healed. With flesh, without word, the world becomes infinite, un-bound by parameters of language.

Madeleine’s fleshy landscapes are just that, open wounds, no beginning, no ending, rather suggestions of infinite manifestations, a never ending morphing of worlds. Internal organs become the landscape, become external, as intestines become mountains as fertility eggs become reservoirs. Colour is indiscriminate, purple jacaranda by pastel pink by brown by indigo. At times awkward, calmer as eyes adjust, what begins as unnatural steers now to a norm and a world where branches can be yolk.

And what of the things that live in these landscapes? They oscillate between craving the artificial and being umbilical-bound to the natural, a mental tug of war to find place and peace in a world of manufactured candy-like temptations. These temptations border beauty but before long fall to the realm of the grotesque; an overindulgence that ends in decay, a melting return to an amoebic state.

With Madeleine’s Candy we see a peeling back and reduction to the point where reality and what once was meet: is the world today, was it the Archean.

Ineke Dane

A reoccurring subject matter in Madeleine's work is the industrial landscape and its convergence with nature. This ongoing investigation contributes to a body of work that began in  2012 when Madeleine relocated from Sydney to her current home in Newcastle NSW. 

Newcastle is an industrial city on the east coast of Australia and home to the world's largest coal port. Madeleine's daily bicycle commute between home and studio, takes in this landscape, when she observes the changing tides and schedule of coal ships or waits behind boom gates for freight trains to drag by.

As a city currently experiencing massive infrastructure development, as well as as its regular schedule of industry Newcastle is a complex working machine. It's salt eaten surfaces, high rise construction and coal loader cycles can be seen in the textured surfaces and multiplied compositions of Madeleine's paintings. Her paintings wrestle with change, with movement, decay and ultimately a fixed state of being. They are cogs in a wheel and working fixtures of a city. 

Select works from the Industry series have been shown in group exhibitions in Sydney and Newcastle and have been acquired by collectors including Artbank Australia. 

Completed in late 2018, Semblance is a refined collection of still life based works built upon the artist’s earlier collection Theatre Of Objects. In this new series, Madeleine continues to investigate the relationship between art and life but with an increased focus on reductive form, geometry and flattening of space. These works demonstrate a shift in the artist’s direction that tends toward abstraction while still maintaining reference to interior and still life imagery.

The Semblance works featured in a group exhibition at Comber Street Studios Paddington in October 2018, curated by Sophie Vander of Curatorial and Co.