some of you might already have noticed  my obsession with old bathtubs … imagine my surprise when I discovered the work of Dorothy Cross.

Dorothy Cross: Eye of Shark

For the past 10 years, Cross has used the shark as a recurring motif in her work, an animal that often remains out of human sight but onto which we project our fears. For this show she has installed a shark’s eye directly in the gallery wall that gazes onto a sea of tin baths.

Each bath has been lined with gold along the scum line, where the dirt normally accumulates, suggesting an alchemical transformation from dirt to gold. This line of gold lies at the place where air meets water and beneath the surface of water, below the depths, is home to shark.

Dorothy Cross: Eye of Shark

I’m not sure why Cross has chosen to connect the shark with old bathtubs – the two parts has yet to come into a meaningful totality for me. It might have to do with the relationships between body and time and the human and the natural world. I guess there is some kind of transcendence at play which I can’t quite grasp – .

But I do like her bathtubs!

And then there is the sea … :

Dorothy Cross (1956, Cork, Ireland)

Leicester Polytechnic, England (BA). San Francisco Art Institute, California (MFA). Dorothy Cross lives and works in Connemara, Ireland