Dorothy Cross
"Cross uses a wide range of materials in her work, including found objects which have been in her family's possession for many years, constructed objects, photographs and animal skins. She has recently made several works using cow hides and, in particular, cows' udders. Central to her work as a whole are themes of sexual and cultural identity, personal history and memory." - Tate
Time – human and geological – has long been one of Cross’s big concerns. She pits fleeting life against the bigger picture of existence. Suspended by near-invisible string, a bronze hand and foot in another mobile hang just above a moon-like disc of milky alabaster on the floor. Like the fingers on the scales, they conflate a cross-cultural range of symbols, suggestive of Catholic relics, witchcraft or the weighing of souls or the heart. They also hark back to our early evolution, a time when we walked with hands and feet.
Two bronze fingers turn slowly on an old pair of scales. Like everything else in Glance, Irish artist Dorothy Cross’s new show at Roche Court sculpture park, digits hang in the balance. Life offsets death, the cosmic is pitted against the terrestrial, the supernatural shines in something as basic and bodily as a ring of soap scum around a bath. In fact, the grease that once lined the massive, thickly rusted tub, salvaged by the artist and placed here on the flagstone floor of the old orangery, has been preserved as powdered gold, the mysterious residue of unknown lives.
The whole show is an exercise in opposites, with the promise of transformation. Outside, on the lawn above fields of gently munching cattle, is another solid vestige of existence. A rumpled bed with a dented pillow – site of birth, death, sex and dreams – has been carved from a block of Carrara marble, a substance once reserved for depicting saints. Cross has performed an impressive resurrection on this material, favoured by renaissance sculptors and now the stuff of pricey kitchen counter tops. This has as much to do with her switch of register, from the sacred to the secular, as the sculpture’s placement within the exhibition’s wider cosmos, a five-tonne counterpoint to works where everything seems airy and fleeting.
Traces of magic, religion, nature and science float through these works. In another photo-diptych, an altar in a decrepit Sicilian church is paired with a coral brain. The altar is empty, its icon long gone, and whatever religious scenes its wooden shell might once have displayed have dissolved to leave an abstraction of peeling paint. The coral brain on the other hand is an extraordinary object, created not by the hand of an artist, but mindless colonies of polyps. With the coral brain’s 900-year lifespan, the Earth couldn’t have fashioned a more pointed symbol of nature bettering man in longevity.
Yet, even as Cross shows us bodies decaying, or belief systems evaporating, others take shape, from the tiny bird’s egg nestled in a piece of cranium in a photograph to the fantastically Gothic, bronze bog iris sprouting from a foetal skull. In her work, everything is in flux.
Reflection
I find the work of Dorothy Cross fascinating as she grapples with a lot of the same concepts that I do within my own practice. The fragile balance between the material and the immaterial is apparent throughout all of her sculptural pieces. Within these works, the cast objects allow the viewer to project meaning onto them, this is important in creating a individual narrative as well as a group associative one. Similarly, my work aims to create a collection of narratives and plays with the idea of truth or myth. Often used to conceal the truth, objects can be employed as decoys or red-herrings to sway the viewer into reading the object through a certain pair of lenses. I find this curation aspect fascinating,and is something that Dorothy Cross does seemingly effortlessly. As she displays the work to collect as many different narrative readings as possible.
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