Echo: Dorothy Cross in Conversation with Iwona Blazwick

For the third conversation of Echo, curator Iwona Blazwick speaks with Irish artist Dorothy Cross about her work and how her forms and images resonate with myth and metamorphosis. Being human in relation to the natural world is a motif running through the sculpture, film & photography of Cross, connecting her work with the animist beliefs of the ancient world. The talk will be followed by a Q&A session. 

Cross came to prominence in the 1990s with her use of the skins and udders of cows to create surreal draped figures reminiscent of Christian statuary. Throughout her career she has continued to cast animal, plant and human forms – ranging from jellyfish and foxgloves to skulls and fingers – making sculptures and films that create metamorphic synergies between us and non-human species. Most recently Cross has turned to carving marble, the material of Antiquity. Sourcing an astonishing range of geological colours and striations, she carves exquisitely rendered feet as part of the stone yet emerging from it.  Rather than pairs of feet, single or multiple feet are captured in the act of walking, like the petrified ghosts of our ancestors. She has commented. ‘Good art should make you consider yourself in relation to time, which means in relation to birth, life and death’. Dorothy Cross’ oeuvre resonates with the winged or four legged gods and goddesses of Greco-Roman statuary and with ancient systems of belief where the non-human world was understood as sentient and magical.