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Wilma Cruise is best known for her powerful life-sized figures in bronze and ceramic. Cruise at Krut: Wilma Cruise Works on Paper, signals Cruise’s first foray into printmaking.

While Cruise’s preparation for her sculptures has always included writing, sketching, and reworking thoughts on paper, she never considered these preparations art-making, but a mere means to an end. Says Cruise:

My usual way of preparing to work on a sculpture is to photograph a figure, photocopy the print, alter it, draw on it, draw from it and write about it. This process continues throughout the making of the sculpture and even after it is complete when I wrestle to access its final meaning through line and word. Thus I fill notebook after notebook.

It was David Krut who suggested that I formalise these private musings into a series of prints… Thus it was that he invited me to work at the DKW studio through the latter half of 2005 and into 2006.

The resulting prints owe much to the collaboration between Jill Ross and Wilma Cruise. Ross, the workshop manager at David Krut Print Workshop, worked closely with Cruise on each image. Cruise observes that, “The DKW studio in general, and Jill in particular, encourage an experimental approach to printmaking. I was free to push limits with Jill standing by ever vigilant to see that I did not fly over the technical edge. The works in effect became a collaboration in the best of traditions – a partnership between artist and print maker.”

Cruise at Krut: Wilma Cruise Works on Paper continues the exploration of the body evident in many of Cruise’s sculptural works, but more specifically traces what she describes as “the idea of subliminal communication – the in-between space – the tension that emanates from bodies and between bodies.”

In several of the monotypes in the show are dominated by a nude figure. Cruise describes this figure in the following way:

The image I chose to work with was a nude bald female figure delineated in rough outline. As a cipher for my own alter ego she is placed centrally in the format together with a small animal – usually a horse or a dog. Although each monotype is unique, it hints at further possibilities by leaving its ghost on the plate and that in turn suggests further manipulations. Thus the monotypes evolved in a series of “progressions” which usually numbered three prints and in one case Progression # 5 – Allegro con Brio, five.

Cruise and printer Jill Ross used the technique of prontoprinting for several of the images, transferring a photocopy onto a polyurethane pronto plate and then onto paper through careful inking. In this process Cruise’s practice of photographing, photocopying, and enlarging images in preparation for a sculpture is turned into a meditation on the process of image-making. Each stage of the process – the photograph, the enlarged photocopy, the inking of the pronto plate – leaves a trace of itself on the paper. “The figure I used in the pronto prints”, Cruise observes, [is incorporated into] a series entitled ‘Studies for a Sculpture’. The sculptures in question are a sequence of life size figures planned for an exhibition in 2007 at the University of Johannesburg Art Gallery.” The first of these sculptures will be exhibited alongside the pronto prints in Cruise at Krut. Like the monotypes, the pronto prints explore the idea of subliminal communication.

Experimental in nature, this body of work pushes the boundaries of Cruise’s oeuvre and illustrates a fruitful dialogue between two very different mediums Cruise at Krut: Wilma Cruise Works on Paper will be opened by Elfriede Dreyer on August 5 at 12h00, and will run up until 23 September 2006.

Keywords: Art, David-Krut, Printmaking, South-African, Wilma-Cruise