Visual Arts: Reviewed Sapiens, Dorothy Cross, Kerlin Gallery, Anne's Lane, South Anne Street, Mon-Fri 10am-5.45pm, Sat 11am-4.30pm. Until April 28, 01-6709093
Dorothy Cross was much taken with the amateur zoologist Maude Delap, who lived a life that, from the outside, may have seemed marked by personal disappointments and the social and cultural limitations and constraints of her time, but was also extraordinarily rich and fulfilled.
Delap was an exemplary scientist, absolutely enraptured by the world around her, and the core of her activity was an intense and systematic scrutiny of the natural world. More and more, one could say, there is something Delap-like in the way Cross's work has evolved, particularly more recently. It involves a passionate engagement with the world as phenomenon and it hinges increasingly on observation.
Sapiens, her Kerlin Gallery show, is a case in point. Right from the first there has been a parsimony and severity to her work in terms of physical substance. Not only was everything pared down, but she was notably reluctant to depart from the thing itself: if a bed was called for, for example, then why not use a bed, why concoct an image or facsimile of a bed? Her Ghost Ship was a ship. So she has consistently shadowed reality in what she has made, drawing closer and closer to her quarry and, like a Victorian naturalist, bagging her specimens and shipping them home for preservation and display.
The resonance of the real object, with its history and associations, is what fascinates her, and her work springs from that.
In a way Cross is an observer, and in a quasi-scientific sense. It's not simply about looking. Her observations span the sensual spectrum, entailing journeys, immersion and discomfort. In Jellyfish Lake she swam with jellyfish - non-stinging, but still.
In Midgies, which is perhaps an odd parable about humans in nature, an apparent pictorial idyll, that of a nude in a landscape, is subverted by the realisation that the subject is being eaten alive by midges. The press release for Sapiens refers to her "ongoing attempt to reposition man in nature and consider the primitive", which is ambiguous but could be loosely true given humanity's persistent attempts to situate itself apart from or above nature.
Sapiens marshals a formidable array of works, most of them veering close to the real. Two video pieces document aspects of the artist's visit to the Melanesian Islands in the South Pacific. On and in the sea around New Ireland, she sought out the "shark-callers", fishermen who maintain a traditional method of shark-fishing, one that sounds perilous, even alarming. Each man works individually, setting off in a small canoe, luring sharks with rattles and songs. In one video, a grizzled veteran recites a song, in the other we have a shark's eye view of a fisherman, with echoes of Jaws.
The shark has long been a favoured motif for Cross, part of her menagerie of ambiguously gendered figures, amalgams of animus-anima in the Jungian scheme of things. One of her best-known works, Shark Lady in a Balldress, underscores these concerns, and her addiction to puns, as in the paradoxical ball-dress. The lush canopy of the gown is surmounted by a phallic shark. Balls feature in Sapiens as well, in the form of cast, deflated-looking footballs. In fact there are many recurrent motifs in the show, including human skulls and whales - the latter of particular relevance to Maud Delap.
ONE BEAUTIFUL IMAGE features a young girl (a prototypical Maud? Girl sapiens) holding a whale bone. Another whale image is, by contrast, horrific. In Whale Graffiti, people have incised graffiti into the skin of a beached whale. Three pieces are life casts from foxgloves, beautiful things, though, as the flower's botanical name digitalis suggests, also the source of a stimulant that is beneficial or poisonous. Arranged on the wall, the long stems lined with bell-like flowers resemble spines.
The centrepiece of the show is Currach and consists, naturally, of a currach, or the remains of one, weathered and decaying, its prow broken across its width. It hangs upended from the ceiling and, beneath it or by implication above it, a gannet is captured in flight. All of which makes a very striking image.
References bounce around the gallery. The form recalls both whale and shark, and it is also phallic. It's worth pointing out that the one thing she could not do was to get a shark and preserve it and exhibit it, because Damien Hirst has done that in a definitive, iconic way. But surely there is some common ground between what she and Hirst are trying to do.
To visit the exhibition is to encounter one striking image or object after another. Pretty much all of them are arresting, engaging, thought-provoking and ambiguous in terms of any putative meaning. Often, both images and objects are just transposed from their position in the world and repositioned in the gallery. This is not to diminish them, or what Cross has done. It's just a result of the way she encounters the world, and the way she sets about her work, discarding and excluding and declining anything that doesn't seem relevant to her. That relevance is surely personal and intuitive, rather than reasoned and didactic.
She clearly loves the pungency of real things, and wants to draw us onto the same level of engagement with them. What she does is not really paraphrasable in terms of a strategic intellectual aim, such as repositioning man in nature, though that may be one way of describing the effect of some of the pieces. The pun element is important in that it alerts us to the lack of a fixed meaning. A thing is a thing but might also symbolise lots of other things, depending on juxtaposition and other factors. Humour is also important in mitigating what might otherwise be taken for a rarified austerity in the work. More than anything, there is a sense that what we see in the gallery is the direct result of Cross's intense, even obsessive scrutiny of the world around her, her reliability as a witness, which is very much in the mould of Maud Delap.
