C104 Review

Valentia: Dorothy Cross and Tom Cross' Medusae

Dorothy Cross and Tom Cross: Medusae, installation shot, Church of Ireland, Valentia; photo Ros Kavanagh; courtesy the artist

Like Dorothy Cross' now famous Ghost Ship that haunted the waters of Dún Laoghaire harbour in 1999, Maude Delap, the self-taught naturalist to whom Medusae is dedicated, wandered ghost-like through Knightstown on Valentia Island in her own sort of second coming over this Easter weekend. As the jellyfish floated in shadowy, ghostly forms across the video screen, it felt like a presence shifted amongst the rafters, causing dirt and dust to descend on the viewers of Medusae at the church where Delap's father had regularly preached.

Staging the first screening of Medusae, the culmination of three years work of the brother-sister, scientist-artist team, on the island where Delap had lived and worked, added poignancy and depth to a part-documentary, part-wildlife programme, part-artwork video that will diminish in meaning as it leaves Valentia to screens around the world. Dorothy Cross, one of Ireland's most successful artists, and her brother Tom Cross, a Professor in Zoology at University College Cork, brought their individual expertise together in an effort to disseminate their shared fascination with jellyfish from Delap to the viewer. Delap was educated with her nine siblings in the family home of Reenellen on Valentia by their mother. After their parents died, she remained in Reenellen with her two unwed sisters for the remainder of her life until 1953. She was an avid collector of natural specimens around the island, which she would send onto the Natural History Museum in Dublin. Her most serious research was conducted on the sea, where she collected jellyfish and then bred in bell-jars the Cyanea lamarki and Chrysaora isosceles jellyfish species for advanced studies. Notes, drawings and charts from Delap's research, alongside new material discovered in making Medusae, as well as some of Dorothy Cross' artwork inspired by Delap, will remain on permanent exhibition at the Valentia Heritage Centre.

Having been funded by the Sci Art consortium, Medusae communicates factual evidence of scientific discovery about the Chironex fleckeri box jellyfish and shifts alternately to communicate a sense of wonder through artistic footage of the flower-like animal's mysterious movements. The visual style changes dramatically between the art and the science sections. In the artistic segments, the camera zooms in on the jellyfish and is accompanied by the eery sounds of the glass harmonica, thereby linking the music of the glass vessels containing liquid with the movements of thin-skinned animal vessels filled with and living in liquid. Then the camera pans out for the laboratory-science shots, including segments with the scientists coaxing the lethal box jellyfish to perform for the underwater camera in the laboratory pool. Narration of their respective art and science sections by Dorothy and Tom lend the piece a documentary feel, yet the central sequence of Fiona Shaw's reading of Delap's research notes, accompanied by wildly flickering jellyfish, unites Medusae's art/science divide.

The video piece, Medusae, revolves around the concept of mystery and considers the different relationship artists and scientists have with the unknown. Tom, the brother/scientist, desires to factually decipher the mysteries of the Chrironex fleckeri (the fastest and most lethal animal in the sea) and then clearly explain about its stinging cells, digestion, and jet propulsion. Dorothy, the sister/artist, is interested, in a somewhat similar way, with the life of Delap; therefore she seeks evidence out of which she can build a story, create a fiction in the unknown spaces. She does not so much want to solve the mystery of Delap's life in the way a biographer would; she instead transfers onto screen the passionate fascination with the jellyfish that consumed the unknown person (Delap). The viewer is transferred into the head (hence the over-two-foot-long enlarged photo of Maude's forehead in the Heritage Centre) of the woman whose intellectual passion propelled her to discover more and more about jellyfish. Tom resumes Delap's intellectual pursuits to carry out the legacy of her discoveries.

Dorothy likewise continues the Maude Delap legacy through her use of Delap's life and jellyfish in her artwork. Her inclusion of the jellyfish is comparable to her previous use of snakes, because both animals are androgynous (one needs a microscope to find out what gender a jellyfish is), thus continuing her fusion of the masculine and feminine symbolic systems within her work. Like the snake, the jellyfish has a mythic life related to Medusa, Latin for jellyfish, because of their similar snake-like tendrils. The jellyfish also contains other metaphors for twenty-first-century life as an organism with a fluid identity, made so poignantly visceral in Dorothy's wall of framed dried jellyfish at her recent Kerlin exhibition. More appropriate for the Medusae production is its footage of the amazing glass jellyfish replicas in Dresden, reproduced with their full fluid inner life intact, like Delap on Valentia Island this Easter weekend.

Sheila Dickinson is writing a dissertation on contemporary Irish art at University College, Dublin.

Dorothy Cross and Tom Cross: Medusae, Church of Ireland, Knightstown, Valentia Island, Co. Kerry, 18 - 20 April, 2003

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