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| Dorothy Cross: Foxglove, digitalis purpurea 2005 screengrab from www.diacenter.org/cross |
Beautiful to the eye, but dangerous to the touch, the flower known as the Foxglove grows throughout western Europe and out the front door of artist Dorothy Cross’s Co. Galway studio. While poisonous, the plant when properly administered can alleviate a number of symptoms, including delirium, a condition that lurks closely beneath the surface of this, Cross’s first web project. Entitled Foxglove, digitalis purpurea, it was commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation and is hosted on their website www.diacenter.org/cross. Unlike some artist’s web projects, that can be peripheral curiosities, Foxglove makes a strong contribution to a body of work of such breadth, that one wonders if Cross doesn’t have a team of art-world elves locked away somewhere in constant production.
Refreshingly low-tech, Foxglove, is constructed with what the artist has immediately at hand; in this case, local flora and a neighbor’s daughter. Stepping out of a period postcard, she is the star of the show, narrating an audio track and appearing in the circularly cropped photographs playing, and not always safely, with the purple, bell-shaped flowers. After an introductory sequence including the girl, the flower, and enlarged details of the plant, we may move the cursor over two centered images with various consequences. Our mouse-pad ‘play’ may dissolve one image or enlarge another; or introduce brief, randomly programmed film loops of either the girl or the flower. Every image brought up on the screen eventually dissolves into a dark Blue tint, for ‘seeing Blue’ is a side effect of ingesting these beautiful blossoms. While interacting with the piece, one ‘Blue’ that surfaced from my memory was Derek Jarman’s elegiac 1993 film, Blue.
The unsettling hold Foxglove has on us issues from a generic, sunny garden and the seemingly innocent actions of a little girl. In the past, this space has allowed for encounters with timepiece-carrying rabbits or the participation in hoaxes that purport to prove the existence of faeries. The circular images themselves are the cold peepholes of science (the microscope), as opposed to the warm, locket shaped ovals of memory. The audio track is impossible to resist. Written by Maud Grieve and published in 1931, an earnest, little Irish voice recites the Foxgloves’ other sinister folkloric names along with medical details and a final, mesmerizing account of its reproductive process. The buzzing, ambient background sounds are so lush you’d wish you were there. Using the most basic means, Cross achieves that elusive ‘sense of place’, but not of time.
In 2001, curators Melissa E. Feldman and Ingrid Schaffner put forward the intriguing proposal that many of “today’s” artists were “Secret Victorians.” Their primary examples employ crafts, design, and pattern to camouflage darker themes. While tempting to consider both Foxglove, digitalis purpurea and Cross’s entire oeuvre in this light, her origins remain in a localized surrealism. Reacquainting myself with her art through the recent IMMA monograph, I come across numerous animals-as-garments (Foxgloves) but also a steady parade of holes, dots (holes pictured?) and bodily orifices. They’re everywhere; drilled through bibles, hanging from ceilings, peppering doors, and held open, waiting to receive the sacrament. Our bodies’ orifices, I reflect, are governed by a degree of control, and an awareness of what is potentially dangerous to insert in them. Like poison-tinged fingers, among other things.
Surprisingly, the nostalgia that Cross’s giddy, flip-book of a piece invokes in me is for the ’70s – when publications like Avalanche included “artists’ projects.” Intimate and fleeting, those pages are as important to me as anything those artists produced, as is Cross’s nineteenth-century puzzle
Tim Maul is an artist and critic who lves in New York City.
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