Paint and Plush

Madeleine Cruise is an emerging artist who creates sensational objects and abstract images that explore emotional experience in contemporary life. Driven by a desire to make complex situations tangible, her work investigates such themes as sexuality, relationships and social status, within a personal and broader social context. In a creative process that explores material equivalents between painting and sculpture, Madeleine creates immersive sensual and tactile environments for contemplation.

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Material Developments

Whilst developing Nightmare on Sugar I experimented with rubber and the colour black. Whilst pastels and plush have been part of my material repertoire for a little while, the Gastro Porn exhibition prompted me to seek something more unsettling and sexually provocative. I felt it necessary to introduce a harsh contrast and a new element that would strip the plushies of their playful innocence and push them into the world of erotica. Rubber has seduced me in its own way as I find myself gritting my teeth in an unusual material pleasure when I twist and contort it, I like how it can strangle the textile so that soft plush oozes out. Images come to mind of hands on a piping bag squeezing out hollandaise sauce onto poached eggs. Like other Plush sculptures and installations Nightmare on Sugar is a hyper real piece, based on life, only this time it is indulging a little more in peculiar guilty pleasures of sensation, aroused by food and who knows what else....