Overview

Dorothy Cross lives and works in Ireland. She works in a variety of media including sculpture, photography, video and installation, examining the relationship between living beings and the natural world. A sense of place pervades her practice. Living in Connemara, a rural area on Ireland’s wild west coast, Cross sees the body and nature as sites of constant change, creation and destruction, new and old.

She has participated in numerous international group shows including the 1993 Venice Biennale, the 1997 Istanbul Biennial, and the 1998 and 2002 Liverpool Biennial. She also took part in the ground-breaking 1994 exhibition Bad Girls in the ICA, London, and the CCA, Glasgow; the 1998 exhibition Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self Representation, which was shown at MIT List Art Center, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; and the San Francisco MOMA.

Many of Cross’ works incorporate items found on the shore, including boats and animal skins, while others reflect on the environment. During the 90s, the artist produced a series of works using cow udders, which drew on the animals’ rich store of symbolic associations across cultures to investigate the construction of sexuality and subjectivity. She has worked on several large-scale public projects, most memorably the award-winning Ghost Ship (1998). In recent years, her practice has focused on nature and the ocean, working with maligned animals such as jellyfish and shark, and exploring rarely accessible areas like sea caves or shell grottos.

A major retrospective of Cross’s work was held at IMMA in 2005, and in 2012 she was part of the IMMA @NCH group exhibition, Time out of Mind  In 2014 Cross was invited to curate a unique exhbition from the Irish National Collections entitled Trove, and in  2017/18 her work featured in the IMMA Collection exhibition Coast-Lines.