Sillages Critiques (Dec 2019)
De l’avoir lieu à l’être-lieu : parcours dans l’œuvre de Dorothy Cross
Abstract
The installations and performances designed by Dorothy Cross, a contemporary Irish artist, are based upon her respect for nature. They challenge anthropocentrism in a poetic manner. By staging the sudden appearance of an archaic bestiality embodied by the shark, the jellyfish or the snake, animals both wild and culturally significant, and by immersing in wild settings, the artist creates spatial reversals. The processes she uses –inscription, embeddedness or concatenation and projection—stand for a symbiosis between man and animal otherness. The metamorphoses of objects or materials that the artist invents establish some continuity between the living world and matter, and between man and animal. Her works are congruent with ideas emerging at the intersection of ecopolitics, ecofeminism, and new phenomenology. Something unexpected takes place in her works so as to evoke different relations with places in which taking place becomes being place.
