One of Ireland's most internationally renowned artists returns with her first solo show in Dublin since her outstanding exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2005.
Dorothy Cross once more brings nature into the gallery space with a new series of works incorporating sculpture, photography and video. Much of this new work is a direct result of a recent visit to the Melanesian island of New Ireland in the South Pacific. Cross spent time in the remote villages on the west coast of the island where risk and ritual still exist, interacting with the 'shark-callers'; fishermen who go out alone to catch sharks in small canoes using rattles and songs to lure them to the surface. Moving much closer to home, Cross has salvaged a Currach with a fractured bow from a beach in Connemara and will install it in the gallery, hanging upside down from the ceiling. Beneath it a stuffed gannet flies, as if above it, up-side down.
The work in 'Sapiens' continues Dorothy Cross' ongoing attempt to reposition man in nature and consider the primitive whilst locating wisdom in object and image. Cross imaginatively presents works that integrate a craving for transcendence amidst the mundane.
Cross has participated in numerous shows internationally including the 1993 Venice Biennial, the 1997 Istanbul Biennial and the 1998 Liverpool Biennial. She also took part in the ground-breaking 1994 exhibition 'Bad Girls' in the ICA London and CCA, Glasgow; the 1998 exhibition 'Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self Representation', which was shown at MIT List Art Centre, Boston, Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami and the San Francisco MOMA; 'Skin' (with Ernesto Neto and Yoel Davids) at the Cranbrook Museum, Michigan, USA. A major retrospective of her career was held at Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin in 2005. Her work is included in the collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Norton Collection, Santa Monica, Art Pace Foundation, Texas, the Goldman Sachs Collection, London and the Tate Modern, London, among others.