Art from the edge - part 1 - Report From Ireland

Art in America, Dec, 1995 by Judith Higgins

Dublin artist Dorothy Cross is preoccupied with gender and the Jungian concept of animus/anima, the image of woman in man and man in woman. In her 1991 exhibition "Power House" at the ICA in Philadelphia, Cross re-created an abandoned electricity-generating station on Dublin Bay in which the equipment and many of the men's belongings had remained [see A.i.A., Oct. '93]. The artist treated the building, which had served as her studio for over a year, like a piece of found sculpture. As a female artist she was penetrating what had once been a totally male kingdom, domesticating it, feminizing it, bringing it back to life in a new form: a male/female space that married the industrial and the domestic, a new kind of power house. Dresser, one of the pieces in the installation, was an abandoned cupboard in which great rusted wrenches, hooks, nuts and bolts cohabited peacefully with shimmering, fragile wine glasses arrayed in orderly rows. The piece constituted the artist's vision of an ideal realm where male and female are truly integrated. "The whole idea of the show," Cross explained, "is the overlap of power in both terrains ... the possibility of strength and power in women and the acceptance of vulnerability of males."

Four years ago, in a museum in Norway, Cross saw an unusual object: a cow's udder that, by means of hand-made perforations, had been transformed into a sieve. This inspired "The Udder," an on-going series begun in 1992, in which the artist covers various structures in cowhides, with the animal's teats predominant The structures are objects associated with traditional female roles (an ironing board, a dressmaker's dummy, a bridal mannequin) or with masculine power (a saddle-horse). Continuing Cross's interest in symbolic and sexual overlapping, the series is more physical its feminizing strategies more aggressive than those in "Power House." The bristly white cowhides, with their huge chocolate-brown blotches and bald pink areas, are startlingly organic, In Amazon (1992) the udder on the cowskin-covered dressmaker's dummy occupies the position of the female warrior's single breast; a teat, having dried and become rigid, projects from it like a phallus. The tall mannequin in Virgin Shroud (1993) wears the silk train from Cross's grandmother's 1914 wedding dress, together with a long, rippling veil of white-and-brown cowhide and a crown of four erect teats. Recovering (in every sense of the word) the primitive, fecund aspects of femininity and combining them with icons of masculine strength, Cross's transmutations enter the unbounded world of ambiguity.

During the IRA Hunger Strikes of 1979-81, Pauline Cummins was living in Canada. Watching those events on television impelled her to take on the subject of Northern Ireland. In her filmed performance Unearthed (1988), Cummins immediately embodies the Northern conflict: "Irish? I'm not really Irish. You see, my mother was English," she says. Taking the long view of Irish history, Cummins connects the victims of violence in the North and the bog people--ritually slain men, women and children of the Iron Age whom the bog has perfectly preserved for 2,000 years. As she reflects on the outbreak of the Troubles in 1968--"Politics never seemed to matter, and then Derry happened"--the artist's face, sometimes ironic, grave and controlled, at other times wincing in anguish, alternates on the screen with a series of six raku-fired clay masks photographed nestling like eggs in the bog grass. With their eye slits, twisted mouth holes and missing noses, the masks are at once bog people and the bandaged, Northern dead who won't stay buried. "They're waiting for a cease-fire," Cummins says. "They're manning the checkpoints .... They're running the country .... They're holding a wake. For us." Cummins seems to be suggesting that we, the living, are trapped in a bog of history.