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. 

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.

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.