Imma's unusual layout persuaded Dorothy Cross that her works could be shown together without losing their impact, she tells Aidan Dunne
The first piece you encounter in Dorothy Cross's exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Imma) is her video, Eyemaker, which follows the eponymous subject as, with great skill, he creates a replica human eye in glass. It would be unfair to those who have not seen it previously to describe the conclusion of the work. Suffice to say that it seems to be, for Cross, an allegory of the artistic process in general and her own experience in particular. And it is a useful pointer as to how we should approach what we go on to encounter in the remainder of the show.
The exhibition is called simply Dorothy Cross, which avoids the descriptive tag "retrospective". Reasonably enough, because Cross, generally acknowledged as one of the top few Irish artists at home and abroad, is too young and too busy to be contained within the definitive boundaries the word implies. It is, you could say, a selective survey of what is an extensive and hugely diverse output to date.
It's also the most substantial show devoted to her work so far. To begin with, she didn't think it could be done.
"On the one hand I tended to approach each show as an overall piece of orchestration, so how could that survive when you take pieces out of context?" she says. "On the other hand each piece taken individually can be very . . . emphatic. So I wondered whether they would just kill each other off if you put them together."
Here, the layout of the building came to her rescue. "All those separate rooms may not suit certain kinds of work but they are good for me," she says.
She was also apprehensive about coming face to face with pieces she hadn't seen for years.
"I prefer looking ahead," she says. "But in the event I liked the past work more than I thought I would."
She also saw correspondences that surprised her. The show is not arranged chronologically, but she feels the dialogue between pieces made years apart is harmonious.
"Also, you tend to feel that what you've done most recently is better, but that's not necessarily so at all," she says.
In terms of Cross's artistic maturity, the kick-start was probably her experience of Jungian analysis in the US in the early 1980s. The experience seems to have unleashed her imagination in some fundamental way, leading her to question her assumptions and surroundings on every level and lending consistency to what might otherwise be seen as a baffling multiplicity of endeavours. The Jungian concept of animus and anima, the complementary male and female constituents of the individual psyche, has been consistently pertinent.
It's quickly apparent that the sea and sea creatures are also central to what she does. Not only is the sea synonymous with life, its depths and the fish who live there are associated with the unconscious and with the feminine. Not that Cross became a kind of evangelical Jungian, revisualising the world around her according to a prescriptive symbolism. Rather she acquired the knack of seeing things in terms of an essentially mutable and partial symbolism and deep, underlying patterns. She went on to explore the cultural conventions, social and religious, of contemporary Ireland with the benefit of the analytical tools she had learned how to employ.
This analytical process tends to produce what might be described as anomalous, paradoxical and often transgressive objects. The earliest piece in the show, Shark Lady in a Ball Dress, for example, sends out typically mixed signals.
IT'S WORTH MENTIONING another aspect of Cross's work here. If pressed on the question of whether art is a mirror held up to nature or a hammer, she would have to answer "both". It's hard to think of another artist as fond as she is of the aura of the real, the unmediated pungency of things. Objects and materials infiltrate her work to an extraordinary degree: animal hides and whole bodies, life casts of human hands, penises and vaginas, myriad found objects, family heirlooms and the musty associations they trail.
Equally, she has an iconoclastic streak, shattering received, hallowed images and replacing them with profane substitutes.
Her Shark Lady wears her grandmother's ball gown. The predatory, phallic creature, with its testicular breasts, also sports an angelic, wing-like fin. It is not only anthropomorphised and feminised but made cute. There are surely allusions to the deadly serious business of mating that goes on within the ostensibly genteel framework of the formal ball, and the unconscious animal instincts operating beneath the notionally superior social rules. The debutante is both prey and predator.
A cluster of works developed around the incisive image of the shark, much as they subsequently did around that of the cow's udder. A typically Irish motif, one might think, but in fact the source was an udder sieve she encountered in a local museum in Norway. Once she'd started, as Marina Warner puns in her essay on Cross, she milked the udder for all it was worth.
In fact, many of Cross's pieces are themselves visual puns. Udders and/or teats are worked into a range of culturally charged objects and images, including a Guinness bottle, a bodhrán, a saddle, a rugby ball, a pillow and even a statue of the Virgin. The general effect is to make us reassess the way we look at these things, the way they are encoded and gendered in everyday life.
Cross also came up with a piece that rivals Shark Lady in terms of its concision and resonant ambiguity. Amazon is a mannequin torso on a stand, a cowhide form that swells to a single breast capped by a cow's teat. It's a vivid, troubling image, mingling ideas of nurture and menace, and in a way it recalls the heyday of the Surrealists. As does Trunk, a wooden trunk that opens to reveal a cow's teat stitched into a pair of knickers: a work that seems to have as many interpretations as it has viewers, to judge by the range of responses by different writers.
Cross is undoubtedly best known for her logistically ambitious and demanding Ghostship project in 1999, which entailed coating a decommissioned lightship with extremely expensive phosphorous paint. Moored off Dún Laoghaire Harbour, the glowing green vessel was seen by huge numbers of people. The ship was in a sense a ghost from Cross's own past. In its previous incarnation it had marked the Daunt Rock a few miles off the coast of Cork. Every summer, Cross accompanied her father on a visit to it.
By its nature, Ghostship can feature only indirectly, in the form of documentation, in the Imma show. The same goes for several of Cross's other major projects, including Chiasm and, with the Opera Theatre Company, her setting of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater in a cavernous slate quarry on Valentia Island, overseen by a Marian shrine. The singers were dressed as quarry workers and emerged from the depths of the cave.
Her interest in Maude Delap, an amateur naturalist who lived on Valentia Island, led to her wider involvement with jellyfish. Delap achieved the difficult feat of breeding jellyfish and amassed a wealth of data which she passed on to the Natural History Museum in Dublin. Cross counterpoints her research on Delap with present-day work on jellyfish, undertaken by her brother, Tom Cross, a zoologist. Medusa documents their complementary activities. In Tom Cross's case, this meant his research on the propulsion mechanism of the deadly Chironex fleckeri, a fast-moving jellyfish indigenous to the coastline of northern Australia.
Cross also made a remarkable video, Jellyfish Lake. It is one of several pieces in which the artist's body seems to be placed in a sacrificial position in relation to nature. Another sees her stretched out naked on a looping, phallic tree limb as food for clouds of Midges. In Jellyfish Lake, she is suspended unprotected under water, among clouds of jellyfish. Yet all is not necessarily as it might first appear.
The jellyfish are of a benign species. Jellyfish, in general,are symbolically charged creatures. Their great antiquity and their circular and tentacular form led to their being seen as symbolic of the self and, more, the essential natural self.
They are also, of course, objects of fear and even repulsion. So, in Jellyfish Lake, Cross is immersed in the deep, buried, unconscious self, the instinctual, animal self from which culture might seem to distance us but which, her work continually reminds us, we can never really escape.