Sculptor to create `ghost ship' with £40,000 award

The concept of floating a painted boat in Dun Laoghaire that will appear and disappear eerily during the night due to special lighting effects has won the sculptor, Dorothy Cross, this year's Nissan Art Project award of £40,000.

The award is given annually for the creation of a temporary public artwork in the Dublin area.

Inspired by childhood memories of lightships, Dorothy Cross's winning proposal, called The Ghost Ship, involves mooring a decommissioned lightship off the East Pier in Dun Laoghaire for a two- to three-week period in October. Covered in luminous paint, the boat will be highly visible in daylight, but after dark will seem to appear and disappear as it is picked out in the glow of lighting designed for the purpose.

Though delighted to have won, the artist was mindful yesterday of the practical difficulties that lay ahead. The £40,000 - generous on the scale of artistic prizes - is intended to cover the costs of the project and provide the artist with a salary while engaged on it.

With the help of the Commissioner of Irish Lights and the Irish Sea Scouts, Cross already has secured a lightship.

The Ghost Ship, she wrote in her submission, "refers to the memory of the lightships whose role and presence were held dear around the Irish coast." Only three of the vessels, designed to warn shipping of underwater hazards, are still working; the rest have been replaced by automated electronic buoys. The nostalgia and poignancy of their disappearance will manifest itself in her ghost ship, says Cross.

Cork-born Cross is one of Ireland's best-known artists. She has exhibited extensively abroad and her work is included in many private and public collections, including that of the Tate Gallery in London. She represented Ireland at the 1993 Venice Biennale and has twice been shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex Artists Award, but has never won. Her work explores questions of sexuality, religion and death through the provocative reinvention of familiar objects.

This is the second year of the Nissan Art Project. Last year's winning entry, For Dublin, by Frances Hegarty and Andrew Stones, featured quotations from Molly Bloom's monologue in Ulysses spelled out in neon letters in nine locations around the city centre. Among 26 proposals considered by the six-member jury was a suggestion by the Laotian artist, Vong Phaophanit, to build a sound-proof room in the city centre from which visitors could see but not hear the hustle and bustle of city life.

The Nissan Art Project is organised in association with the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA).