Frith Street Gallery is currently presenting an exhibition of new works by Dorothy Cross. Working in sculpture, film and photography, the artist studies relationships between body and time and the human and the natural world; using richly symbolic materials to create strange and often unexpected encounters.
Image: Dorothy Cross, Eye of Shark, 2014 Cast iron baths with gilding, marble panel, shark eye and display box, amber glass. Photo P A Black © Artlyst 2015.
The shark has been a recurring theme in the artist’s practice for a decade. A preserved shark’s eye is housed within the wall of the gallery itself,the shark features heavily in the exhibition; in this instance secreted within a reliquary is the organ of vision belonging to an animal that remains mostly hidden to humans and upon which we often project our fears. Here the shark’s eye acts as a metaphor for an alternative vision.
Image: Dorothy Cross, Eye of Shark, 2014 Cast iron baths with gilding, marble panel, shark eye and display box, amber glass. Photo P A Black © Artlyst 2015.
The shark eye’s gaze falls on an assembly of ancient cast iron bathtubs that partly fill the gallery space. Each of the empty baths has been lined with gold along the scum line where bodily dirt normally accumulates, the work suggests an alchemical transformation from dirt into gold. This line of gold lies at the place where air meets water, delineating the divide between the two elements.
Image: Dorothy Cross, Eye of Shark, 2014 Cast iron baths with gilding, marble panel, shark eye and display box, amber glass. Photo P A Black © Artlyst 2015.
The artist also presents a new bronze work formed from the casts of a shark’s body and a model submarine. The two are conjoined in a blurred pairing of function and nature, where the ergonomic form of the submarine mirrors that of the shark. Here the submarine, an instrument of discovery as well as destruction, bonds with the shark which is one of the planet’s most ancient and threatened creatures; still largely unknown and existing in an inaccessible realm.
Image: Dorothy Cross, Bond, 2015, Patinated bronze. Photo P A Black © Artlyst 2015.
In “Buoy” the underside of the skin of a Blue Shark has been gilded in precious white gold. The shark’s empty form balances on a painter’s easel below which a thin slab of translucent alabaster sits in the place of a canvas. The stone is cool, smooth and white, bearing echoes of the once living skin.
Image: Dorothy Cross, Buoy, 2014, Blue shark skin, white gold leaf, antique easel, Italian alabaster. Photo P A Black © Artlyst 2015.
About the artist:
Dorothy Cross was born in Cork in 1956. Recent solo exhibition include: St Carthage Hall, Lismore Castle Arts, Lismore, Ireland (2014), Turner Contemporary, Margate and Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2013). Selected group exhibitions include What We Call Love: From Surrealism to Now, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Cristallisations – la naissance d’un ordre caché, Musée du cristal Saint-Louis, France (both 2015), Crescendo, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2014), and Aquatopia, Nottingham Contemporary (2013). Cross curated the exhibition Trove at The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin in 2014.
Dorothy Cross: Eye Of Shark – Frith Street Gallery – until 23 December 2015