Dorothy Cross
Dorothy Cross is a contemporary Irish artist whose work is multidisciplinary, embracing sculpture, film, photography, and at times opera. Living in Connemara, Dorothy is surrounded and inspired by nature and the ocean. Her work looks at our place in the natural world in relation to time and the sacred - often playing with the intimate, forgotten or unseen.
“I have a friend who talks a lot about spirituality and art and how they are inseparable. I often liken the art world to bad visibility when you’re scuba diving, searching for treasure – you glide along and then sometimes something emerges. You have to keep hoping. I believe we have to do what we can during our short time on this planet to attempt illumination and hope for progress.”
“The commercialisation of work is a tricky territory and I feel art should not become a factory line to mass produce something just to make lots of money.”
“Out on Rangiroa lagoon, I watched big Tahitian men gently pick up the finger bones with calipers and place them inside the oysters. It was like a gynecological procedure. The oysters were then placed in mesh bags and driven out in boats into the middle of the lagoon, where they were kept underwater for several months. I left after about two weeks and the shells stayed there for nearly a year.”
“This one index finger visually connects to everything. It connects us to the heavens, to Michelangelo and Leonardo. It was one of those beautiful happy accidents.”
“I had a simple idea: to put a human heart on a ship and have it sail upriver with the beautiful singer Lisa Hannigan alone on deck singing songs about the heart. I wanted to honour the many migrant people who disappear below the surface of the Mediterranean Sea, their drowned hearts lying unnamed on the seabed. The Irish navy ship we used for Heartship, the L.E. James Joyce, had saved over 18,000 people trying to cross the ocean to safety.”
“In my work Telescope, I used a human skull that came from my aunt’s collection. I gilded the inside of the skull with pure gold. Alchemically, gold is the purest, most transformative of substances. I placed a meteorite inside the skull cavity. So what occurs in the piece is the transition between the human body postmortem, hopefully accessing something higher, and the arrival of the meteorite, which existed in outer space, entering Earth’s atmosphere from the heavens. It is a play between inner space and outer space.”
“I have a friend who talks a lot about spirituality and art and how they are inseparable. I often liken the art world to bad visibility when you’re scuba diving, searching for treasure – you glide along and then sometimes something emerges. You have to keep hoping. I believe we have to do what we can during our short time on this planet to attempt illumination and hope for progress.”
