Marc O'Sullivan: Dorothy Cross is an artist who alters how we see the world

Dorothy Cross and her dog Connie. Picture: Patrick Cross

Dorothy Cross is a native of Cork who now lives and works in Connemara. Her work as an artist is often inspired by the natural world, and incorporates objects such as bones and taxidermied sharks and birds. 

She is perhaps best known for a series of works made from cowhides and udders. These include figurative pieces such as Virgin Shroud and Amazon, but also a saddle, a rugby ball and a pair of stilettos, all of which feature cow’s teats. The series was inspired by a domestic sieve fashioned from a cow’s udders she encountered in a museum in Norway in the 1980s.

Cross’s work also has a strong association with the sea. In 1999, she created a piece called Ghost Ship in Scotsman’s Bay, Dun Laoghaire, covering a decommissioned lightship, the 140-foot long Albatross, in phosphorescent paint. Over eighteen nights, the spectral vessel glowed in the dark, to the delight of the thousands who saw it. 

Twenty years later, in 2019, Cross produced a work called Heartship in Cork. It involved a Navy vessel, the LÉ James Joyce, sailing up Cork Harbour, carrying a human heart found encased in a lead case in a crypt in Cork city in 1863. Lisa Hannigan sang on deck, while a recording of Alasdair Malloy playing the glass armonica was broadcast from below.

Many of Cross’s sculptural pieces combine two disparate elements to unusual effect. One such example is Basking Shark Boat, which was first exhibited in 2013. For this, Cross preserved the skin of a basking shark found dead on a beach in Co Wexford, and draped it over the frame of a small currach produced by Meitheal Mara in Cork. The piece is now in Ireland's Great Hunger Museum in Quinnipiac University, Connecticut.

Born in 1956, Cross was educated at the Crawford College of Art and Design in Cork, at Leicester Polytechnic in the UK, and at the San Francisco Art Institute in California. She is now recognised as one of Ireland’s most prestigious artists. A long-time member of Aosdána, she has had large scale solo exhibitions at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin. Her latest show, Damascus Rose, is showing at the Frith Street Gallery in London until 14th April.