Rosemary Madigan, sculptor

Art Gallery NSW

In the history of white Australian art we have seen few exceptional stone or wood carvers.  Gerald Lewers, with his work of the 1930s and 40s was one, and Rosemary Madigan was another.  In an understated career, spanning at least six decades, Rosemary Madigan became this country’s most accomplished white-Australian carver of figurative works. Working within European-centred traditions, and also under the impact of the Asian sculptural heritage, she produced works with a figural austerity and minimalism, yet arresting humanity, which can be productively viewed alongside this country’s outstanding Aboriginal traditions of carving.

Rosemary Madigan was an an independent thinker who never felt the pressure to conform to mainstream preoccupations or aspirations.  She was also one who trained in an age when artists spent long gestation periods as students.  In Madigan’s case a very early resolution to become a sculptor (made at around 13 years of age in 1939) was followed by at least a decade of study – at the East Sydney Technical College, Sydney (later the National Art School), at the South Australian School of Art in Adelaide, at the John Cass College in London.

Rosemary Madigan’s roots also run deeper into this country than many others.  Born in Glenelg in 1926, but living for a long time out in the country, near the NSW town of Yass, she was originally part of a prominent South Australian family, extending on her mother’s side to John Wollaston, who sailed to Western Australia in 1840 to become the Anglican minister of the ill-fated ‘Australind’ settlement, and later Archdeacon of Western Australia.

And on her father’s side, Renmark vine-grower Thomas Madigan, who had a son Cecil -  Rosemary’s father -  a meteorologist, Rhodes scholar and academic, who travelled with Douglas Mawson on his ill-fated 1911-13 Antarctic expedition, and who also led the first white settler expedition to successfully cross the Simpson desert, in 1937. 

Raised at Blackwood in the foothills south of Adelaide, and drawn to her father’s small yet extraordinary collection of Aboriginal artefacts (some of which would hang in her Yass studio), Madigan claimed her country upbringing as the source of her preoccupation with the solid world and her desire as a child ‘to get close to objects’. As the result of an early illness she left school in 1938 but she had enrolled at East Sydney Technical College by 1940, after her family moved to Sydney during war. Here, and later at the College under Lyndon Dadswell (in 1947-48), Madigan consolidated her commitment to sculpture in the company of a remarkable set of student sculptors including Oliffe Richmond and Robert Klippel   She became aware of the work of the British modernists, particularly Henri Gaudier-Brzeska whose sculptural vitality and simplicity deeply impressed both Madigan and Klippel. Rosemary Madigan gravitated to carving, a process associated with modernism but an ancient practice which brought to mind not only the objects in her father’s collection but the geological formations of the land.

In 1950, twenty three year old Madigan won the prestigious NSW Travelling Art Scholarship, one of the few awards of the era which enabled artists to travel overseas. She received the award, the third only sculptor to do so in 35 years, with works exhibited at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. There is no question that her subsequent experience was cathartic. She travelled to London, reconnected with Australian sculptors such as Oliffe Richmond, studied at the John Cass art school in London; and became familiar with the work of the immediate post-war generation of British sculptors.  She also met Henry Moore – as a number of Australian artists of that era did.  But she also followed a highly independent path, shaped by her growing preoccupation with the ‘humanity and down-to-earth-ness’ of medieval sculpture, and with the great traditions of Hindu and Buddhist sculpture – the first real impact of which she felt on her visit to the (then) ‘Bombay Museum’ during her journey to Europe.

In letters sent to the Travelling Scholarship committee over three years Madigan plotted a physical and intellectual journey.  She studied the work of Picasso, Matisse and Modigliani for example, but she also intensely pursued the traditions of Romanesque and Gothic sculpture through the churches and museums of England France, Italy and Belguim - including highlights at the Romanesque Abbaye-aux-Hommes and Abbaye-aux-Dames at Caen, and at the 12th century Cistercian abbeys of Casa Mari Aquino and Ferentino.  At the cathedral church of St Lazare Autun in Burgundy she discovered a sculpture by Gislebertus, a magnificent tympanum of the Last Judgment with Christ presiding over elongated figures ‘and a stunning reclining Eve among the gardens with her hand about to take the fruit and a look of wonder in her eye’. And in her later extensive tour of Italy over 1952 she saw ‘the most beautiful works in stone that I have seen in Europe’, in Norman cathedrals in the region of Apulia. For Madigan such ‘stylised yet entirely human stone carvings without pretension’ had an overpowering vitality.

Similarly Madigan devoted herself to Asian sculptural traditions through the collections at the Guimet in Paris and Rietberg Museum in Zurich, before she spent a month in India in 1953, with her husband and by now, two small daughters – a feat she had also managed in her time away. Visiting Bombay and Elephanta and drawing and photographing sculptures at the extraordinary (and not easily accessible) temple cave complexes at Ajanta and Ellora in the province of Maharashtra were a highlight. The former, the site of around nine centuries of Buddhist masterpieces of religious art dating from the 2nd century BC, incorporates monumental stone sculptures depicting the life and tales of Buddha.  The latter, holding an extraordinary set of Buddhist, Hindu and Jain temples built over perhaps the 6th to 10th centuries AD, encompasses Buddhist statues along with the renowned Kailasa, a monumental temple covered in Hindu carvings in high relief and in the round.

Works like the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ ample wood-carving, Torso of 1953-54, one of the first sculptures Madigan carved after her return from India, give clear indication of the effect of her sojourn in Maharashtra and the sensuousness, subtlety and stylisation of the region’s three dimensional art. Nonetheless, from the time she first worked with an automatic drill at the Cass College in 1952, carving in wood or stone and the subject of the female torso have remained constants in Madigan’s art – and indeed prove to be her great forte. In the most arresting of these, sculptures of wonderfully understated carving such as the AGNSW sandstone Torso of 1986, Madigan synthesises the subtlety and amplitude of Indian work with the minimalism and humanism of the Romanesque and other archaic traditions, whilst simultaneously positioning her art within 20th century modernist practice. Torso 1986 won the Wynne Prize winner for 1986, the first time this prize had been won by a sculptor in over thirty years. 

Although Madigan’s overseas study gave her a strong sense that Australian cities needed to develop the kind of relationship to sculpture that she saw in the public spaces of Europe, her own life was largely consumed by a decade of raising her daughters and teaching, after her return to Adelaide in 1953.  Indeed it was not until the early 1970s that her compact, subtle torsos came to greater public prominence, along with major wood carvings such as Eingana 1968 (held in the National Gallery of Australia), where Madigan aimed at an expression of her sense of a possible Australian unity through the fusion of European and Aboriginal artistic and spiritual traditions.  Over the seventies and eighties she also became interested in collage and assemblage – a development owing something to the cut-outs of Picasso and Matisse, and to her partner, Robert Klippel – which Madigan viewed as a means of moving into more geometrical work, or less involvement with natural forms.

Rosemary Madigan’s preoccupation with the figure has been based on her interest in generic human form and the articulation of inner structure rather than a search for realism. Many of her torsos exclude the head and limbs under this desire. In Torso 1986 (Art Gallery of New South Wales), the abrupt cutting of the upper torso is mirrored by a hard-edged sandstone base so that the figure is compressed between two bands of stone - highlighting Madigan’s desire to find a stability, or what she has called an ‘eternal sort of quality’, that happens ‘only when you take the work out to a defined edge’.

After extensive participation in solo and group shows, and a long period spent living in Balmain, Madigan moved to Yass in 2001 to set up a drawing and collage studio and a large outdoor space for carving; and to be close to several of her family. Here in a perfectly sited minimalist house, designed by architect Gary Lewin, she experienced the high cloudy skies and generally blond paddocks of the Yass countryside on a daily basis.  She said in 2010, ‘You can’t go back, you would simply be an artisan if you copied certain traditions.  You have to absorb all you are interested in and then simply carve a piece of stone. When I have that piece of stone I forget all I’ve learned and simply start carving.’

That she could do so, so successfully, is a great testament to her as an artist.

In 2011, Madigan’s work was subject of a focus exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.  The show brought Madigan’s exceptional carvings to the attention of a great many people previously less familiar with her work and paid tribute to her distinguished contribution to Australian art.  

Deborah Edwards (former Senior Curator, Australian art, AGNSW)

Denise Mimmocchi (Senior Curator, Australian art AGNSW)