RECON(FIGURE)
A solo exhibition by Wilma Cruise - IS Art Gallery, Stellenbosch 9 April 2022 – End May 2022 www.is-art-gallery.com
In conversation with Wilma Cruise by Jane Taylor
Jane Taylor: I’m going to begin by asking you about the enigmatic idea that this exhibition has something to do with politics and power. Wilma Cruise: Yes it does. In my latest series of exhibitions, I investigate the dynamics between the human animal and the non-human animal. Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass, provide the meta-metaphor to investigate the inversion of power between human animal and animals. Alice stands in as the cipher for human. In the upside-down rabbit hole world, it is never clear who Alice is. All sense of who she is falls away. She is not even sure of her size. ‘Who are you?’ asks the haughty caterpillar and a little later, the pigeon, who thinks she just might be a serpent, asks, ‘What are you?’ Alice does not have the answer to either question. The caterpillar’s question is significant. Who is Alice and, by extrapolation, who are we? Are we right to presume our position of superiority in relation to the animals? Do we really deserve our place on top of the Cartesian pile? Jane Taylor: That is obviously part of the unconscious of the exhibition. You talked about Alice not knowing if she was too big or too small. Scale is an enormous factor in your work. I’d really like you to think with us about what size means and about how the body engages with the work in relation to its size. Wilma Cruise: Scale is important especially when working with ceramics. Fired clay raises the spectre of the ‘art’ and ‘craft’ debate. Working small in fired clay has the implications of home industry and craft. It is the very last thing I wanted. I wanted my work to be confrontational and the only way to do that is for the work to enter the space of the viewer. In other words, to work on a human scale. Making things life-size, is like stamping
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one’s foot, and saying, ‘Hey look, this might be a material associated with craft pottery and its emphasis on the interior of the vessel but this is also sculpture with a shift in emphasis to context and (horror of horrors), meaning. Ironically twenty-five years down the line I am making smaller figures. I use them in multiples to suggest scale and the monumental in the miniature. Jane Taylor: I also want to think about scale in relation to these very surprising horses. They are beasts of burden. They have such a sense of the weight of their lives upon them. And I was struck that these horses have riders, be it of an allegorical kind. Can you give me some idea of how these horses got riders? One is a baboon, one is a figure with a pig’s mask. Wilma Cruise: This is where I worked intuitively. I can look retrospectively and say this is what a work means. But, at the time, it was just let’s put a rider on the horse and see what happens. Poor Horace had been knocking around in bronze material for about ten years before I thought of giving him a rider. What I’ve done with Horace is to undermine the normal trope of the horse in art, which is of magnificence, movement and grace – and yes, power. The usual mode of depiction of this animal is to elevate the horse on a plinth with a male hero on top, in what I call a phallic configuration. Jane Taylor: What is so exhilarating about this conversation is that it pulls together so many aspects of your being. The passion for making, your commitment to the image and also this regard for live beings and our interspecies relation. Wilma Cruise: The whole drive for me within the Alice series of exhibitions is to equate animal beings with human beings without anthropomorphising them.
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