"I NEVER wanted to be known as the udder woman, because that has always been just one part of my work," says Dorothy Cross, one of Ireland's most celebrated contemporary art practitioners, the artist many people will, nevertheless, know best by that pun. "I don't get upset about it though. The only thing I would get upset about is if people thought my work was only about women, because it's not."
Cross, who was born in Cork in 1956, did her initial art training at Crawford School of Art, though she later moved to Leicester to take a degree in 3D design, and travelled to San Francisco to study printmaking, a wide ranging apprenticeship which gives some indication of the variety of her work. Certain materials may turn up again and again, but Cross, as her current exhibition at Sligo's Model Arts Centre shows, produces sculptures, installations and photographs of striking diversity in everything but their conceptual clarity.
Ebb, her "coming of age" one person show in Ireland (from which Shark Lady in a Balldress turns up in Sligo) took place at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in 1988. From her earliest days, however, Cross has maintained an international presence, taking part in numerous group and solo shows abroad, as well as representing Ireland at the 1993 Venice Biennale alongside Willie Doherty.
THE first came across the object that inspired her "udder" work on a top toy in 1991. On a visit to a folk museum she saw a handmade sieve, an object "something like a bodhran" which used the punctured membrane of the cow's udder. "I was amazed that the cow was being used as something more than a milkmaking machine," says Cross. "The impact was as strong on me as Meret Oppenheim's Fur Teacup..." It was only later, she says, that she remembered Freud's suggestion in his study of Dora that the udder might "play the part of an image intermediate between a nipple and a penis."
"For about two years, the udders totally informed me on what to do next, almost, and it was fabulous. But then it came to a point when I realised it would be just too easy to stick udders on things for the rest of my life," she says. "I had a dream that I went into Macy's in New York and everything was covered in udders. I really hate it when something is successful and then everybody suddenly wants it. I don't want to be the kind of artist who just continues in one way that people feel comfortable with, so I decided not to do any more ...
After that, Cross did one more "udder" piece - Trunk, a trunk containing pairs of underwear in which nestled one last disturbing teat - and moved on.
Recently her shows in Ireland have concentrated on new individual works, but abroad she has worked frequently in experimental contexts, creating site specific installations. Her first major international show, Power House, (held in Philadelphia) featured various works which aimed to recreate the industrial ambience of her early Poolbeg studio and, like much of her work, used "found objects", little bits and pieces and items of bric a brac she discovered in her possession or around her studio.
These items she then manipulates into sculpture. Sometimes the process involves intensive intervention, such as with a series of metal work helmets cast with nipples at their crowns; sometimes, as in Dresser, a work seen in her current Sligo Model Arts Centre show, most of the artist's work has been the selection and presentation of sets of chunky screws, pipes, bolts and water glasses.
Cross continues to work on such site specific projects. In 1996, in San Antonio in Texas, she created Cry, a installation revolving around a refrigeration chamber, the shelves of which were crammed with frozen snakes, while in Belgium she created a work for a moving museum on a train.
HER Sligo show is not a retrospective, or even a mini retrospective, Cross is quick to say, but the event nevertheless gathers several strands of her work that time and geography have kept separated. "I wanted to show works that stand up on their own, works that wouldn't need people to know the other work in order to understand them, pieces that would survive out of context with the complete shows."
The Model Arts Centre, with its large atmospheric classrooms now whitewashed into bright functionality, their bare floor boards washed and swept clean, makes an ideal setting for her sculpture. The long hallways and large atmospheric rooms provide an impressive variety of spaces, as well as offering "fabulous floors". What's more, she says, because of the large space "you don't have the problem of early work conflicting with older work."
The other source of conflict which Cross is keen to keep away from the exhibition, and indeed from her work in general, is too much discussion of her ideas about her own work's significance.
I could talk to you for 10 hours - but not on tape - about the meaning of every piece of work, but I don't want to do that, because it will determine people's understanding of it. They can go with their own translation. People thirst to ask what is it about and then, if you tell them, what is the point? They lose their own experience ... I feel that once the work is out on the floor, it has nothing to do with me anymore,
