Dorothy Cross's work was exhibited in the The exhibition Irish Art Now From the Poetic to the Political that toured America and Canada in 1999 to 2001. Starting at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston, who uses a mix of media and methods from video to taxidermy. In her work familiar objects a Bible, a bridal train, a Guinness bottle metamorphose covered with cowhide, they sprout udders. While Cross may summon up the cliched vision of the old country, all beer, religion and rural idyll, she actively engages in new cultural life there. She sat on the committee of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art during the 1980s the organization that Evie Hone had helped to found, and her work is in the collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art,in Dublin. Her work can be linked to that of Meret Oppenheim, whose Object Fur Breakfast 1936 is a teacup, saucer and spoon covered in fur. Cross made a teacup the focus of her video piece. Storm in a Tea Cup 1997. Oppenheim's shockingly sensual use of fur has its parallel in Cross's cow hides, although Cross takes the game of suggestive ambiguity one step further with her use of udders. These symbolize female fecundity, but in Cross's work they appear stiff and swollen, and are also suggestively phallic. Cross was included in the exhibition Fetishism, that toured from London's South Bank Centre in 1995. She has made art in which stuffed snakes appear, sometimes wrapped in bandages. These may represent a contemporary crisis in masculinity, and are both humorous and monstrous.
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