sculptor, was born on 5 December 1926 at Glenelg into a South Australian family which included the geologist and explorer Cecil Madigan. In 1939 she studied at the Girls Central Art School, Adelaide, having decided very early on to pursue a career as a sculptor. After moving to Sydney in 1940 Madigan attended night classes at East Sydney Technical College before returning to Adelaide where she completed three years at the School of Art (1944-46). She then returned to East Sydney and studied under Lyndon Dadswell , graduating with a Diploma in Fine Art (Sculpture) in 1948. Under her married name of Rosemary Giles, Madigan won the NSW Travelling Art Scholarship in 1950, the third sculptor to receive this award since its inception in 1935.

Her studies at the John Cass College, London, in 1952-53 were augmented by extensive travel in Europe, including a year spent in Italy. She returned to Australia via India in 1953 and settled in Adelaide, where she raised her daughters and taught pottery, painting and sculpture at various schools and at the School of Art. She completed a major commission, the Downer fountain for St Mark’s College, Adelaide, in 1964. Madigan returned to Sydney in 1973 and continued to sculpt and teach. In the 1980s she experimented with assemblages-constructing works from small wooden machine pattern parts-before reverting to carving figurative works in wood and stone, the materials in which her most significant sculptures have been produced. She has continued to draw, paint and produce collages in parallel with this. She was the partner of sculptor Robert Klippel for last decades of his life (though living in separate houses).

Madigan has been the recipient of a number of Australia Council grants and was the winner of the Wynne Prize in 1986.

Since her first experience with an automatic drill-carving a stone female form in London in 1952-the female torso has been the focus of much of Rosemary Madigan’s work. Madigan has had an active career as both a teacher and sculptor since winning the prestigious New South Wales Travelling Art Scholarship in 1950 – this is her presentation work – but it is only in the last decades that these compact and subtle torsos have come to greater public prominence. She should also be better known as the creator of a number of the most compelling religious sculptures executed in Australia, for instance The Yellow Christ (1968).

An independent thinker, Madigan’s interests since her student years have placed her somewhat outside the mainstream of Australian sculptural production. Yet her allegiance to the humanist tradition, with its adherence to the impact of the sculptor’s hand, has been of primary importance to the development of many of Australia’s modern sculptors.

Madigan’s exposure to Indian sculpture-beginning with a visit to the Bombay Museum on her way to Europe and three weeks spent drawing the Ellora cave sculptures on her way home-has been profoundly influential. It is not surprising that while in Europe in the early 1950s it was not the heritage of Henry Moore or the biomorphic visions of the immediate post-war generation of British sculptors which had lasting impact, but the `humanity and the down-to-earthness’ of Romanesque sculpture.

Critics have tended to assess Madigan’s art as a restrained homage to the preoccupations of an earlier generation of modern figurative sculptors, and indeed several of her most successful torsos share qualities intrinsic to Gaudier-Breszka’s work, for example. Nonetheless, although figurative concerns have largely remained central, the parameters of Madigan’s art are larger than such a characterisation would allow.

Torso (1954) is not based on the life model but on Madigan’s desire to explore and articulate generic human form. Executed in Adelaide, this was the first sculpture she completed after returning to Australia. In its stylised, attenuated form-somewhat removed from the spare late works-one is tempted to see the sinuous line of Indian sculpture. Madigan has said of it:

I think I was very concerned with understanding the body … not specifically as far as muscles went, but the way the inner structures-the rib cage and pelvis, two major inner structures-work together. Because I was so interested in the way it articulated, I didn’t deal with the arms or legs or head. I was not thinking of realism at all, but of the basic articulation: coping with a complex three dimensional form … I was never concerned to get a “type” of figure … I’m really only interested in the form.

Writers:

Edwards, Deborah

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

1992