Wilma Cruise is a South African sculptor and visual artist working mainly with fired clay in her renderings of human and animal figures. Themes explored in Cruise’s work include the interface between humans and animals and existential conditions of muteness. 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.

Cruise has had over twenty-five solo exhibitions; Cruise’s recent shows include Coterie of Cats at Tokara (2022 -2023) and 1984: Fight Or Flight? Recycle Re-Use Re-Con (Figure) (2020) as well as a series of seven exhibitions entitled, The Alice Sequence that challenged human exceptionalism by drawing analogies between our world and the rabbit hole world of Alice in Wonderland.

In addition, Cruise has also curated exhibitions and 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.

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS