BOISBUCHET RESIDENCY PROGRAMME
RITA GALE CRUISE
SEASON 2022
Rita Cruise in an artist who grew up in the Southwest Virginia mountains. She lives on an old farm (circa 1830), workshop and studio that she designed and restored. Believing that most materials may be found within the earth that surrounds us, Rita strives to repurpose, refurbish, or reclaim to create works that reflect and honour the natural world.
The Appalachian Mountain woodlands live within Rita’s work. Each piece of work is designed to fulfil its purposeful and beautiful life. It could be a quilt that tells a story from the textile design, cutting, piecing, and stitching of the fabrics. Or the wooden tables made from century old crosscut hardwood lumber, each one reclaimed with new intent for the owner.
In her presentation, Rita had visitors gather around and mediate upon the trees of the forest, listening to the wind in the leaves. She hung large pulmonary shaped structures to represent the lungs of the forest, a single cicada wing suspended sculpture created from bamboo, hemp and metal string to tether and bind in form. She collected natural artefacts from the surroundings – stones, water, wood, leaves – and mixed them with materials from the workshop – metal, cork, wire.
As the centrepiece to the installation, Rita collected berries, seeds, flowers, grasses, tree bark and rusted metals for dyes. She dyed fabric and made dimensional resist patterns to represent nature. Rita used the dyes to paint a four part tree season and to create a patchwork quilt which paid homage to the domaine’s landscape.
Rita yearns to share what she has learned to do with others, plant seeds to remember those that have gone before or stitch fabric patterns rich with designed memories of lives and loves. To build spaces in the woodlands to reflect, be still and grow in nature.
Rita worked in the forest on the domaine: next to the beehive and the cemetery, with a view out towards the château and adjacent to the fields grazed by the horses.
