17/06/2026
‘For several years, my fourth-floor desk in the ramshackle former Irish Times building on Fleet Street in Dublin was next to a large pillar. I used it as my gallery, taping to it festival posters, front-page photographs and whatever art was intriguing me. Things came and went, but one piece of paper torn from some magazine or catalogue remained a constant.
It showed two black-and-white images of a storm in an elegant teacup. The top one was of a roiling empty sea. The bottom one was of three men on it in a curragh. The stills were from Man of Aran, Robert Flaherty’s ethnofiction film, a manipulated documentary from 1934. The artist who had superimposed the stills on to the vintage teacup was Dorothy Cross.
Every time I looked at the ocean in the tiny cup and at the valiant rowers I felt drawn in. No matter how often I looked – and I looked at it daily, for years – it still seemed fresh, and also somehow disturbing, beguiling and menacing.
“That teacup is inside in the kitchen,” Cross says now, of the blue-and-white cup with the golden handle and delicate flower trim. We are sitting in her magnificently located studio at her Connemara home, mugs of coffee to hand.’
Read Rostia Boland’s full interview with Dorothy Cross RHA in last Saturday’s Irish Times Ticket culture magazine on the Irish Times website.
Link (€): https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art/2026/06/13/dorothy-cross-the-beautiful-is-always-bizarre-it-is-never-about-trying-to-shock
