Dorothy Cross:
For her COMMA commission at Bloomberg SPACE, Cross brought together video and sculpture to represent the notion of the pearl in terms of both accepted monetary and aesthetic value but also to explore its creation and formation in nature.
The central work* for the commission Pearl Bones documents Cross' trip, several months before the exhibition, to a pearl farm in Tahiti where she worked with a pearl farmer to insert five finger-tip bones into five black-lipped oysters in the hope that the animals will create pearl around the irritant. If the animals accept them it will take up to two years for a pearl to form as the oysters incrementally secrete nacre to coat and create a natural reliquary around the bone.
This ongoing interest in mapping a particular animal's accumulated wealth of symbolic associations was further underpinned in the exhibition by the presentation of a shark skin. In a small darkened room in the rear gallery Cross hung the grey, shriveled skin of a lone shark, gilded inside with 21carat yellow gold. Elsewhere in the gallery a small video projection showed a pair of hands overflowing with hundreds of swarming Hermit crabs crawling out in a continuous flow.
* All materials used in this exhibition were ethically sourced.
Dorothy Cross (b. Cork, Ireland, 1956) lives and works in Galway, Ireland.
