Welcome to the world of Dorothy Cross, an artist whose work adds grist to the psychoanalytical mill (unsurprising given that she underwent Jungian analysis more than 20 years ago).
This summer the Cork-born Cross follows Kathy Prendergast and Willie Doherty as the third “Irish artist of international repute” to receive a mid-career retrospective at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, a timely acknowledgement of her significance as she heads towards her 50th birthday next year.
Cross is best known for the feat of illusion in which she conjured a spectral ship in Dun Laoghaire six years ago. Ghost Ship, a disused lightship covered in phosphorescent paint, haunted Dublin Bay for three weeks. It was the 1999 Nissan Art Project, a temporary public artwork, the popular memory of which has long outlasted the event.
At Imma, the exhibit is represented by documentary footage and a maquette, a glowing reminder of one of the keys to Cross’s artistic success: she is masterful at finding the right scale for her concept.
From the grand gesture of a soprano and a tenor singing disconnected love songs through the thick concrete wall of a handball alley in Chiasm (another 1999 outdoor project) to the intimate mystery of a kiss cast in silver, Cross works with a deftness and vision that seldom falters.
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The Imma show includes more than 40 works and charts her activity from Shark Lady in a Ball Dress (1988) — a shark in a taffeta dress; in other words a man-eater — to her most recent film work, Antarctica (2005), with its colour-inverted footage of silent glaciers and sluggish seals.
From the stark implication of human finger bones in Bone Gloves (2001) to the majesty of last year’s Stabat Mater, a performance of Pergolesi’s opera in a slate quarry on Valentia Island, Co Kerry, it’s an exhibition that is by turns thrilling and stupefying.
Ghost Ship had a mesmeric visual quality that guaranteed its enduring popular, but the work also tapped into a childhood love-hate relationship with spectres and pirates and an adult wariness of the uncontrollable sea. It made a big statement without being overly showy and offered a more family friendly encounter than usual with one of Cross’s main preoccupations: the fine line between love and anxiety.
Cross once had a penis made from Waterford crystal. She said afterwards she wished she had brought a camera to film the glassworkers’ reaction to the finished piece. It’s a telling detail because audience response is the final element in everything the artist does. Of course this can be said of all art, but in Cross’s case there is a strong sense that the work does not come alive until it meets its viewer. With Cross, the focus shifts from the artwork to the viewer and stays there.
In the early 1990s she began a series of pieces using cows’ udders. Stemming from her discovery of a sieve made from genuine cow parts in a museum in Norway, the Udder works include Pap (1993), a Guinness bottle with a cow’s teat top and Trunk (1995), with its disturbing custom-made knickers.
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Both exhibits can be read as evidence of either guilty pleasure or some sort of unspeakable abuse; Cross provides no answers and makes no judgment, but instead leaves it up to the viewer to note and analyse their own reaction.
Although the udder motif wears thin at times (she has covered everything from stilettos to ironing boards), Cross rarely misses her mark and it is an Udder work that provides the show with its most monumental and disturbing image.
Virgin Shroud (1993), a menacing presence that appears on the verge of coming alive, is made from a full cowhide draped over the train of Cross’s maternal grandmother’s wedding dress. Taking on a horribly human form, it looms like a spectral goddess, a half-woman, half-bovine presence with a crown of cow teats.
Despite the macabre fairytale quality that imbues much of her work, Cross never lets the viewer escape to the relative comfort of fantasy: the naked woman in her Midges (2000) DVD has bikini tan marks, and the thighs so beatifically lit by the candle held between them in Candle (2000) bear the slight marks of recently removed jeans. These women are as real as the mortuary table Cross uses as a projection screen to such chilling effect in Slab (1999).
Her use of family heirlooms and found objects also adds edginess to the work, but Cross has the ability to charge everything she touches with sexual tension. Rugby (1996) presents two blurred prints of players, enlarged like a private investigator’s damning evidence, that make the touch of hand on buttock seem suspect, the bend of head to groin potentially lascivious.
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The artist is at her best when being both cheeky and unexpectedly profound at once, as in Silk (2000), a photographic diptych in which a pair of female nipples peek from the centres of embroidered flowers. So unassuming and domestic it could be easily passed over, it is arguably the strongest piece in the Imma show.
The exhibit’s camouflaged pink protrusions hang at chest height, the humour of their presentation equalling the surprise of their discovery and merging with the strange uneasiness that follows. It is a work that offers instant familiarity, but immediately mixes it with an overwhelming feeling of alienation: something tender and intensely private made excruciatingly public.
In everything she does, Cross negotiates a delicate balancing act, orchestrating that pivotal moment between shock and revelation for the viewer. Her work is unmistakably Irish in its origins and references but it bristles with an awareness that elevates it beyond parochial beginnings. Cross engages with issues of sexual repression, tension and confusion while probing modern Irish attitudes to religion and tradition: her Twelve Apostles (1992) sit unapologetically like a row of phallic sex toys on a bench.
The show opens with Eyemaker, a video work from 2000 that operates as a 22-minute welcoming statement. In it a man works to create a realistic glass eye only to pop it like bubble gum before the screen fades to black.
Although she is neither the eyemaker of its title nor the person with the camera who shot it, it’s a film that reveals several things about Cross’s work.
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She is concerned with detail but inexorably attracted to the theatricality of big gestures. She often values process over result. She likes to walk the knife-edge between attraction and repulsion. In her world, as in ours, life’s most beautiful moments are also unexpectedly fragile. Luis Buñuel would have have approved.
Dorothy Cross, Imma, until September 11