Dorothy’s art gives death new lease of life

Lifestyle – Judy Murphy meets an innovative artist whose art works challenge the notions of beauty and ugliness

Early in her career as an artist, Dorothy Cross visited Norway, where she saw a cow’s udder being used as a sieve. The udder was stretched over a circle of timber, in the way a goat’s skin is treated here in Ireland to make a bodhrán.

That sight opened her eyes to a part of the cow’s body that most people would only ever regard as being useful for producing milk . . . assuming we were to think about it at all.

“That use of an animal was so functional and so economical and showed an appreciation of every aspect of the cow,” she says. It struck Dorothy as being humorous and tragic, and was also slightly surreal to someone seeing it for the first time.

That was a long time ago, but since then, animals – among them, sharks, jellyfish, crabs, cows and humans – have all featured in Dorothy’s art.  Her sculptures, films and photographs encourage us to reassess our relationships with the world around us, challenging notions about what we deem beautiful and what we regard as distasteful.

Her work is beautiful, surreal and often challenging but nothing is done to shock or be grotesque, she says. In person, she is warm and quirky and that’s reflected in the art, where there’s a sense of mischief and gentle humour.

“There has to be,” says Cork-born Dorothy who lives just outside Tully Cross in Connemara, with seas, mountains and islands on her doorstep.

Her work is about exploring aspects of life, she muses, sitting in her purpose-built studio that looks onto the Atlantic, as two dogs lie at her feet. One is hers, the other is a neighbours. Dorothy’s studio, which was added to an existing bungalow she bought in the early 2000s, was built at an angle, to maximise the view while limiting exposure to the weather, and it’s a ‘wow’ place.

Much of Dorothy Cross’s work centres on marine life – her love of all things maritime began at a young age. Reared in Montenotte in Cork City, her family had a small house by the sea in nearby Fountainstown, where the family spent a great deal of time. Her parents had met while boating, so the sea was in her genes. Dorothy and her sister were champion swimmers and she is still passionate about swimming. The main reason she settled in Tully Cross was that Scuba Dive West is right beside her, which offered her an opportunity to continue the scuba diving that she had begun in the South Pacific. Scuba Dive West are brilliant, she says.

Her studio, which houses everything from mannequins to a two-ring stove where she is melting wax, is dominated by a ‘currach’ hanging from the ceiling. She hung it there to tidy it away, she explains. The piece is titled Basking Shark Currach and has the skin of a basking shark stretched over a timber frame similar to a currach’s. This piece looks like a currach, but its skin isn’t as you’d expect and its timberwork is exposed, meaning the viewer must examine it several times over see exactly what’s going on. The body of the shark used here was found washed up on a beach in Waterford and she had it transported to her studio.

Another work, Everest Shark, is based on a blue shark, which was supplied by a fishmonger in Northern Ireland.

She made a model of that blue shark and cast it in bronze. Then she created Everest on its back. This bronze sculpture was her way of examining time and the way humans perceive it. Sharks have existed for over 400 million years, and Everest rose from the bottom of the sea 60 million years ago, she says. The arrogance of the human notion of time in relation to geological time is something she challenges.

While sharks recur in her work, it’s getting more difficult to obtain them now that killing shark for food is illegal in Ireland – something she’s happy about. Dorothy’s work uses these creatures to explore the world around her; “the relationship between the beautiful and the rugged . . . and our attitudes to things”.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.