Dorothy Cross

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Dorothy Cross (born 1956) is an Irish artist. She was born in Cork and works in a range of media from sculpture to video. She represented Ireland at the 1993 Venice Biennale.

Dorothy Cross came to the public attention in the early 90s when she began producing sculptural works which incorporated cow or snake hides and explored the cultural and symbolic significance of cows and milk and of snakes and poison. Virgin Shroud (1993), for example, is a veil made from a cow skin with the udders forming a crown.

She is perhaps best known for her public installation Ghost Ship (1999) in which a ship, a disused light ship, was painted with luminuous paint and moored in Dublin's Dún Laoghaire Harbour. A recent series Medusae includes images of Chironex fleckeri, a type of jellyfish and was made in collaboration with her brother, Tom Cross, a zoologist. Her work often appears to explore the gap between the real and unreal, the known and unknown, the imaginable and the unimagined.

The Irish Museum of Modern Art held a major retrospective of her work in 2005.