Bio
Wilma Cruise’s work explores the interaction between humankind and animals. In her
doctoral thesis, Thinking with Animals: An exploration of the animal turn through art making and metaphor, she explores the conditions of communication between the human animal and other animals; a condition that transcends the spoken (human) word. Communication depends on semiotics, body language and prosody (tone of voice). She maintains it is not the animals who cannot speak, (and therefore cannot reason), but us who cannot listen. If we do bother to listen, conditions of empathy are created between all animal kind as she so often demonstrates in her baboon sculptures.
As the 2023 Woordfees festival artist Cruise exhibits The Animal – what a word! The title is derived from Jacques Derrida’s exposition The animal – Therefore I am. Ironically, the exhibition explores the condition of muteness between human and animal via the extensive use of the word.
Cruise’s recent shows include Coterie of Cats at Tokara (2022 -2023) and 1984: Fight Or Flight? Recycle Re-Use Re-Con(Figure) at the Everard Read Gallery, in Cape Town 2020). The Alice Sequence a suite of seven exhibitions that challenged human exceptionalism by drawing analogies between our world and the rabbit hole world of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, formed the basis of her doctoral exhibitions: The 8th Square and Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast (2016).
Wilma Cruise has completed a number of public works, including the National Monument to the Women of South Africa at the Union Buildings, Pretoria (in collaboration with Marcus Holmes); The Memorial to the Slaves (in collaboration with Gavin Younge), in Cape Town and The Right to Life at the Constitutional Court, in Johannesburg.
Her work is represented in public, corporate and private collections. She has participated in the Havana Biennale, the Florence Biennale and the 7th Gyeonggi International Ceramic Biennale in Seoul, Korea. Cruise is a fellow of Ceramics South Africa and writes extensively in the field of ceramics.