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Prominent South African sculptor Wilma Cruise is well known for her life-size ceramic sculptures of the human form. In the past year however she has embarked on an experimental foray into the medium of print under the tutelage of Jill Ross at the David Krut Arts Resource in Johannesburg. The results of her venture were shown at Krut’s Gallery recently.

Print-making techniques tend towards the meticulous, where clean, unambiguous line reigns supreme. Cruise’s working method is diametrically different; loose, expressionistic line drawings and scrawled text inform blunt, often brutish ceramic figures. Cruise confessed in her exhibition statement that she was not a little concerned about this conflict of interests. But methods have changed in the print-making industry and a modern method referred to as “prontos” seemed the perfect vehicle for Cruise’s visual idiom. Prontos utilize polyester plates in what is essentially a lithographic process. From this starting point, Cruise pushed further into unknown territory and began to incorporate colour into her work by working on a series of monotypes. Cruise’s fears proved groundless as she discovered that her chosen print methods more than adequately supported her thematic concerns.

For some time now, Cruise has been interested in the schism that unavoidably exists between language and actual lived experience. Many of her prints and most of her recent sculptures lack arms, eyes and mouths – those parts of the human body that signal verbal and gestural expression. Her explanation for the incompleteness of her figures is two fold: on the one hand she wishes to articulate an impotence and helplessness of the figure, and of the artist, to communicate the true nature of experience. On the other hand, her omission of body parts strips her figures of individual identity, allowing them to become signifiers of a collective experience. Such a tactic allows for broad contemplation and reflection whilst preventing a sensationalist reading of her often harrowing subject matter.

In her new work with pronto and monotype methods, Cruise has been able to freely superimpose and juxtapose the human figures and animals that she is currently preoccupied with in much the same way as one would when building up a collage or montage. This process of visual and conceptual layering allows her to explore another aspect of communication: that non-verbal “subliminal” interaction that exists between all sentient beings, which she expresses through the interactive poses and postures of the subjects in her artwork.

Cruise’s prints, unlike those produced by more traditional print techniques, reveal a lot about her working process. After each unique monotype has been printed, the ink is wiped off the press, but a trace always remains that will be transferred onto the next print. Cruise refers to this residue as a “ghost”, and often uses it to provide a departure point for subsequent prints - another strategy that allows for the laying down of levels of both visual and conceptual complexity. Seeing the ghost that is retained in each new print is rather like experiencing a sense of déjà vu, and seems to refer back to Cruise’s central theme of the equivocality of language: any attempt to communicate absolutist concepts is bound to be sabotaged by the viewer’s own experience, their unconscious thoughts, and their dreams.

When printing using the pronto method, one is limited by the size of the polyester plate. But this is familiar territory for Cruise since she has always had to take the size of her kiln into consideration when creating her ceramic works. In both cases Cruise takes size constraints in her stride, and rather than trying to conceal the joins in both print and ceramic, she accentuates the imperfect fit of the join in a way that seems again to hint at schisms, breakdowns and the dysfunctional nature of language.

I believe that Cruise’s new direction in art making succeeds because she does not become a slave to the more controlling aspects of her medium, but instead subordinates the medium to her artistic intention. Cruise’s prints, like her ceramics, are not concerned with the presentation of an immaculate, finished product. Ghosts, joins and visible erasures are all retained in order to provide the sense that the work is mutable, alterable and always in flux, thereby rendering them excellent symbols for lived experience.

Keywords: Art, Artists, Community, David-Krut, Jackie McInnes, Printmaking, South-African, Wilma-Cruise, Writing