Dorothy Cross

Dorothy Cross (born 1956) is an artist born in Cork, Ireland. Working with diverse media, which includes sculpture, photography, video and installation she represented Ireland at the 1993 Venice Biennale. Central to her work as a whole are themes of sexual and cultural identity, personal history, memory and the gaps between the conscious and subconscious.

Career

She attended the Crawford Municipal School of Art in Cork before undertaking degree studies at Leicester Polytechnic, England, from 1974 to 1977. She also studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, California from 1978 to 1979 and 1980 to 1982 where she completed an MFA Degree in printmaking.[1]

Exhibiting regularly since the mid-1980s, Cross came to mainstream public attention with her first major, solo installation, 'Ebb', at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin, Ireland. This was followed, in 1991, by 'Powerhouse', at the ICA in Philadelphia, the Hyde Gallery and Camden Arts Centre in London and Kerlin Gallery in Dublin. Like 'Ebb', several of the component parts that made up 'Powerhouse' were 'found' objects - many of which had been in her family's possession for years or were located from different environments. These were then incorporated into mixed media pieces for exhibit.

During the early 1990s, Cross witnessed a traditional sieve created from stretched cow's udder at a local museum in Norway and stated, "Seeing that a cow could be used for something other than producing milk was a total revelation." In response, she began producing sculptural works, utilising cured cowhide, cow udders and stuffed snakes, which explored the cultural and symbolic significance of sexuality and subjectivity across cultures. For Cross, the use of udders generated a strange mixture of disgust, hilarity, and excitement. Also inspired by Meret Oppenheim's Object, Virgin Shroud (1993), for example, is a veil made from a cow skin, hanging over the figure (as if preventing the figure from speaking or communicating) with the udders forming a crown, in relation to the Virgin Mary.[2]

She is perhaps best known for her public installation Ghost Ship (1998) in which a disused light ship was illuminated through use of luminous paint, in Scotman's bay, off 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.

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

Her most recent exhibition, View, took place between September and November 2014 at the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin, Ireland, which included a series of new sculptures and photographs. The works are exemplary of the artist’s complex exploration of the connection between humans and the natural world, playing with material, relationship and time, captures the artist’s ongoing compulsion to agitate possibilities for new perspectives and points of view.[3]

Notable group shows

Notable solo shows

Works in collections

Further reading

References

  1. ↑ McGonagle, Declan, O'Toole, Fintan, and Levin, Kim. Irish Art Now: From the Poetic to the Political. New York: Independent Curators International, 1999. Print.
  2. ↑ Mundy, Jennifer. "Dorothy Cross: Virgin Shroud 1993." London: Tate Modern, 1997. Article. http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/cross-virgin-shroud-t06948/text-summary
  3. ↑ "Dorothy Cross: View, 5 September- 6 November 2015." Dublin, Ireland: Kerlin Gallery, 2014. Article. http://www.kerlingallery.com/exhibitions/dorothy-cross/selected-works
  4. ↑ "'Virgin Shroud', Dorothy Cross - Tate". Tate.
  5. ↑ http://www.hughlane.ie/collection/collDetail.asp?offset=5

[1] [2] [3]

External links

  1. ↑ McGonagle, Declan, O'Toole, Fintan, and Levin, Kim. Irish Art Now: From the Poetic to the Political. New York: Independent Curators International, 1999. Print.
  2. ↑ Mundy, Jennifer. "Dorothy Cross: Virgin Shroud 1993." London: Tate Modern, 1997. Article. http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/cross-virgin-shroud-t06948/text-summary
  3. ↑ "Dorothy Cross: View, 5 September- 6 November 2015." Dublin, Ireland: Kerlin Gallery, 2014. Article. http://www.kerlingallery.com/exhibitions/dorothy-cross/selected-works