South African sculptor and visual artist Wilma Cruise is a force to be reckoned with. She turns 80 in February 2025 and is an inspiration, not only through her work which has garnered recognition world-wide, but in the way she lives her life, always pushing the boundaries, for example, getting her doctorate at the age of 72.

Quite apart from her extraordinary academic achievements, Cruise blazed a trail in the world of art at a time when there weren’t many women sculptors. She vividly recalls in the 70s joining a group of sculptors at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg only to be ‘surrounded by men with beards and broken nails’ who asked her what she was doing there.

This month, from February 8, her work goes on show at Knysna Fine Art in a collaboration with sculptor Richard John Forbes. The exhibit is named Scorched Earth – A Conversation.  Forbes’ work holds the spark of abstract expressionism, while Cruise’s work holds the torch to figurative expressionism (20^th century art movements that had specific ideologies). What links them is a concern for the environment and the fact that the earth has been scorched by human hubris and greed. For the purposes of this exhibition both their works were subjected to fire, the lick of open flames, whether to vitrify the clay, temper the steel or melt igneous rock to the state of glass.

Cruise works mainly with fired clay in her renderings of life-sized human and animal figures which are most often bronzed. Her sculptural installations and exhibitions are often accompanied by large format drawings on paper. She has also completed several series of print editions.

Her work exists in public, corporate and private collections throughout South Africa while she has also made her mark on the international art scene. She has participated in the Havana Biennial, the Florence Biennale and the prestigious 7th Gyeonggi International Ceramics Biennale of Korea – to name just some. Cruise’s work lives in Holland, California, Turkey, the UK and quite possibly could pop up anywhere in the world, she says.

Cruise is a fellow of Ceramics South Africa and writes extensively in the field of ceramics.

She has had 25 solo exhibitions at leading galleries, a new one every two years, and she’s lost count of how many shared exhibits she has participated in. Her work is currently on exhibition at the Everard Read Gallery in London.

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.

The main themes she explores in her work is the interface between humans and animals. In her doctoral thesis, Thinking with Animals: An exploration of the animal turn through art making and metaphor she explored 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) and Cruise maintains it is not the animals who cannot speak, (and therefore cannot reason), but we humans 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, she says.

She describes each work she does as “capturing the mood, the empathy between animals and humans without it being a wildlife study, but at the same time not humanising the animal so that it becomes kitsch like a dog in human clothes.”

Cruise is perhaps most famous for creating baboons in various sizes. “They are funny and so closely resemble humans. They are curious, opportunistic, they are aggressive when challenged, one never tires of watching them.”

Could Cruise perhaps be seen as the Desmond Morris of art since this famous zoologist and author of The Naked Ape and People Watching is a world authority on human and animal behaviour. The difference here is Morris conveys his knowledge in words and Cruise in clay.

Cruise’s academic qualifications include: a Transvaal Teachers Higher Diploma in 1966; a BA Honours from Wits University in 1969; a BA Fine Art (Cum Laude) from Unisa in 1989; a Masters Degree in Fine Art (Cum Laude) from Unisa in 1997 and in 2017 a PhD from the University of Stellenbosch.

Cruise went to Benoni High School at a time when art wasn’t offered as a subject. After matriculating, she completed her teaching diploma, attended Wits University to study speech therapy, and then she majored in English and psychology. Still not sure of her direction, she then set off for a year with one tiny suitcase to see the world ‘on a shoestring budget.’

She tells me that a highlight of her travels was that she was one of the first people to cross into the West Bank after Israel captured it during the Six-Day War (June 1967). She even missed her flight home to do this.

After her wanderings she came back to South Africa, met and married John and some 56 years later they are still soulmates. The couple lived in 10 different places in 10 years as John was a mining engineer who kept getting transferred. It was during this time, Cruise says, the penny dropped and she realised that she was envious of people who could create art. Always pushing the boundaries of learning, Cruise attained a BA Degree in Fine Art with Unisa. Her sons were born and then the study-bug bit again and she completed a Diploma in Ceramic Science at the Johannesburg Technikon. She instinctively knew that sculpting was going to be her primary art language.

In 1991 she published a book called Contemporary Ceramics in South Africa, which chronicled a very important chapter and time in South African ceramic art, she says. It’s out of print now, but Cruise says it can sometimes be found for a ‘tidy-penny’ at second-hand bookshops.

No surprise that, after her Master’s Degree in Art, Cum Laude of course, she was offered a scholarship to do her doctorate. It took her about 10 years to decide on her subject, but at the age of 72 she finished her PhD at the University of Stellenbosch.

The creative process

It’s hard work making art and one piece takes about a month to complete, Cruise says. She doesn’t follow traditional ceramic methods. Rather she builds her statues with what she refers to as ‘little cookie-sized clay balls’ which get stacked and manipulated as the process unfolds. “Think of it as a CAT scan if you will…I build from the inside outwards.”

Once the piece is built, it is fired in a kiln and it is then sent to a foundry for the lengthy and ‘hideously expensive’ process of bronzing, she says.

For the purposes of the Scorched Earth exhibition her ceramic work was subjected to actual flames. “I didn’t know what effect fire would have on the ceramic and it was either beautiful or disastrous.”

A glimpse into her sanctuary

When she and her husband moved to Herold’s Bay from Cape Town four years ago, she had to have a place to work and Wilma likes room, lots of it, so John added a studio to give Wilma a space of two squash courts. “The space around my work is as important to me as the actual pieces,” says Cruise adding that if she had her way every one of her works would have their very own room to preside in.

One of Cruise’s all-time favourite sculptures is then of no surprise at all. In Maurizio Cattelan’s Him exhibition in London (2001), Cruise explains to me how a diminutive figure in a tweed suit with breeches kneels at the end of a long room. The space around it and the walk to it is what renders this experience so dramatic and unforgettable. “From the back he looks like a schoolboy, but then you see his face and realise it’s Hitler. It’s a small statue, but an enormous work given the space it occupies,” explains Cruise.

Wilma’s most favourite works

Her baboons in various shapes, sizes and incarnations hold an ongoing enchantment for her, but she likes her Alice in Wonderland works and sequences that have featured in seven high-profile exhibits. “In this series of exhibitions and works I interrogate the curious interface between Alice in Wonderland and the animals that inhabit her dream world. Using ceramic sculpture, painting, drawings and text, I explore the nature of animal and human communication within the fecund metaphor provided by Lewis Carroll’s tales of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.”

She has created a great Dane called Pup Zara which is testament to the joy and trust children have in a dog, she says.

Then there’s a piece called Phoebe which is a Boston Terrier modeled after a dog who lived in an apartment in New York and had his own nanny to take him to dog school every day. Both these pieces will be on exhibit at Knysna Fine Arts from February 8.

Behind the art

All her life Cruise played sport, competitive squash for 14 years, with the emphasis on competitive, she tells me. She has scuba-dived, sailed, swum, rode horses until four years ago, and hiked, sometimes barefoot.

The loves of her life, apart from her husband, John who is also her one true art critic, are her sons. Dear to her heart is Joey ‘an opinionated Dachshund’ and Jack the Golden Retriever ‘a very old and loving gentleman.’

She is an avid reader and it’s no surprise that Anna Karenina, an epic novel by Russian author Leo Tolstoy, is probably one of her favourites.

Part of her art journey she enjoys the most is the installation of her work, choosing what goes where in the respective galleries and interacting with all the people involved in the process.

Her feeling when she parts with a piece of her works? “I can only hope that people will take time to understand what that baboon, or animal, is saying to them.”

Her final words to me are ‘there is no such thing as a retired artist.’ Watch this space.

I get to meet her husband John and he tells me Wilma is ‘the glue’ that holds their family together.

She does not let obstacles, health challenges, or even her wheelchair, stand in her way as she sculpts her way through life.