Publications

Dorothy Cross

By: Rosemary Shirley

Busy with Sciart projects and with work in ’Metamorphing’ at the Science Museum, Dorothy Cross spares time to reflect on some of the highs and lows of being an artist; describing how artistic faith has carried her through.

Dorothy Cross has always played against certainty and the institution – images of her family bible with a hole neatly bored through its centre are testament to this. It is clear that for her, part of being an artist is creating her own authority and many of her actions over the past twenty years have been based on a strong faith in her practice. She came to prominence in the early 1990s with her distinctive series of sculptures, combining cowhides and udders with domestic objects. The result was a disturbing, sometimes amusing, but essentially fascinating body of work, rich with mythological and psychoanalytical associations. Virgin shroud, a cowhide lined with her grandmother's wedding train with teats positioned at the head, is now in Tate Modern's permanent collection. Cross has since made a conscious decision to stop making 'udder pieces', aware that with such distinctive work it is easy to fall into the trap of becoming 'an art product'. Her most recent work takes the form of a film centred around the story of Victorian amateur zoologist Maude Delap, who carried out obsessive studies of jellyfish on a small island off the south west coast of Ireland; a project for which...

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