Dorothy Cross
Kerlin Gallery presents
Dorothy Cross
at OFFSCREEN Paris
With support from
Kerlin Gallery is pleased to present a solo presentation by Dorothy Cross at the 4th edition of OFFSCREEN. The gallery will present three of Cross’s signature works in La Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière, a 17th-century chapel and former asylum in Paris’s 13th arrondissement.
Still Room
2000
For five years in the early 1990s, Dorothy Cross’s studio was housed in a derelict power station in Dublin bay. This ghostly environment – filled with control panels, lockers, workers’ helmets, goggles and tools – became a rich source of imagery and material for the artist in this pivotal period of her career. Still Room (2000) is a striking photographic self-portrait taken in this environment. Surrounded by the detritus of industry, Cross stands nude in a pose of defiance: seemingly pushing against the edges of her existence, her body a shock of life in this male-coded but abandoned mechanical space. The photograph positions Cross as a leader of a generation of female Irish artists who challenged contemporary social issues in provocative and compelling works. Printed in duratrans on laminated glass as an edition of 2, the second edition of this work is in the permanent collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
Dorothy Cross
Still Room, 2000
duratrans on laminated glass, edition 1 of 2
119 x 154 cm / 46.9 x 60.6 in
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ROOM
2019
Room (2019) sees one of Cross’s most iconic subjects – the shark – hand-carved into a 240 x 480 cm Carrara marble sculpture. As if surfacing from the ocean, the creature’s body emerges from a serene marble surface, rippled by bluish veins. The history of this maligned species, spanning over 420 million years, is longer than that of the stone from which it is carved – and yet it is the shark’s vulnerability, along with that of all marine life, that is captured in this monumental work.
“A Delphic shrine to nature … Embedded within the fluid patterning of the metamorphic rock surface, the shark becomes part of a slowed-to-stasis ocean of deep-time geological flows.” – critic/lecturer Declan Long on Room
Dorothy Cross
ROOM, 2019
Carrara marble
24 x 240 x 480 cm / 9.4 x 94.5 x 189 in
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Table Telescope
2016
In Table Telescope (2016), Cross demonstrates her enigmatic approach to materiality. An antique brass telescope is suspended from the ceiling, its gaze flipped downwards towards a gilded human skull containing a meteorite. Conjuring a religious reliquary, but in which the human instead becomes a container for the natural world, it playfully subverts both religious and scientific orders and pits the brevity of human existence against the vastness of cosmological time.
“All works attempt to make sacred” – Dorothy Cross
Dorothy Cross
Table Telescope, 2016
cast iron table, antique brass telescope, gilded human skull, meteorite
table 49 x 28 cm/ 19.3 x 11 in
telescope 91 x 5 cm / 35.8 x 2 in
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about the artist
Dorothy Cross
b. 1956, Cork, Ireland
Lives and works in Connemara, Ireland
Working in sculpture, film and photography, Dorothy Cross examines the relationship between living beings and the natural world. Living in Connemara, a rural area on Ireland’s west coast, the artist sees nature, the ocean and the body as sites of constant change and flux. Her works harness this fluidity and generative power, staging unexpected encounters between plants, animals, body parts and everyday objects, resulting in strange, hybrid forms that range from the lyrical, sublime and meditative, to the erotic, humorous and playful. Her sculptures might incorporate classical materials such as Carrara marble, cast bronze or gold leaf alongside discarded antiques, old boats, washed-up jellyfish, whale bones or animal skins found on the shore. Treating these materials with equal reverence, Cross honours the legacy of art history but also the geological and ecological histories that far predate it, reflecting upon our place within the environment. Her works also draw upon a rich store of symbolic associations across cultures to investigate the construction of religious, social and sexual mores, subjectivity, memory and vulnerability.
Red Erratic, 2021
Folkestone Triennial, UK, 2025
Photo: Thierry Bal
Current/forthcoming projects include Folkestone Triennial, Kent, UK (19 July – 19 October);‘Kinship’, a solo exhibition at Archaeological Museum, Zagreb, Croatia, (27 November 2025 – 1 February 2026); the Hayward Touring exhibition Acts of Creation: Art and Motherhood (various venues across the UK and Ireland, 2024–2026), The Gorgeous Nothings, Chatsworth House (15 March – 5 October); ‘Down Deep: Living seas, living bodies’, State Gallery of Art, Sopot (30 October – 4 April) and the 25th Biennale of Sydney (14 March – 14 June 2026).
Dorothy Cross has exhibited in museums including MoMA PS1; ACCA, Melbourne; Tate, St Ives; ICA, Philadelphia; Modern Art Oxford; Turner Contemporary, Margate; the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol and Camden Arts Centre, London. She has participated in the Venice, Istanbul and Liverpool biennales.