Frith Street Gallery

Frith Street Gallery will be closed on Friday 22, Saturday 23 and Friday 29 April. We will be open on Saturday 30 April.

Frith Street Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new video, photographic and sculptural works by Dorothy Cross.

Cross’s practice examines themes of personal history, cultural identity and the gap between the conscious and subconscious. Her work amalgamates found and constructed objects which are often inspired by her immediate surroundings of Ireland’s west coast. Debris tossed onto the beach by the Atlantic or plants and places with folkloric associations are manipulated to coax a strange poetry from the seemingly everyday.

Cross sees much of this exhibition as being about aggregation or growth.Stalactite is a film of The Great Stalactite of Doolin Cave in County Clare which has grown over the course of one million years in its lonely and silent black chamber. In the film a boy soprano stands beneath this spectral object, singing non-verbal sounds in a curious juxtaposition of the paces of human and geological time. The Doolin Stalactite has also inspired the sculptural piece Earth which hangs from the gallery ceiling. This piece is composed of hundreds of bronze casts of human fingers pointing towards the ground.

Finger-tip Pearl and Tooth Pearl are on a completely different scale. These are tiny works, created by the formation of nacre around human bones. Made by Tahitian Black-Lipped Oysters these works are the results of a project to create pearls from the fingertips of a human hand. Only one finger bone was accepted by the oyster as well as one of the artist’s baby teeth. Here they are displayed in beautiful custom-made cabinets.

Footwear Skins is a series of bronzes which have been cast from assemblages of different kinds of skin: found rubber sea boots, fins and human feet. Their hybrid forms elegantly positions man back with in the natural world.