My mother was brought up in England and she met my father on a yacht off the coast of Ireland. They raised us in Cork and we spent nine months of the year in the city and three months down by the sea in a little place called Fountainstown. It was a beautiful combination.
There was a little cove near our house in Fountainstown where we swam. I was quite timid and a bit of a scaredy cat, but my brother, who is nine years older than me and became a swimming coach, saw that I had a good breaststroke kick and he lured me to train for the under-11 nationals at Butlin’s, where I won the 50m breaststroke. It led me to train more seriously along with my sister. Swimming was a big part of our childhoods. We swam 360 days a year. It was hard-core, but it was great fun.
My brother and sister and I went to a funky little school, which began as a private school and then went public. It had no art room or domestic science room, but they made do; we painted at the back of a classroom with a very enthusiastic art teacher. I was quite a shy kid and art was a way of being, a way of going and doing something.
Both my parents had a passion for craft and for objects, especially my mother. You could tell by the way she placed objects in the house that she had an incredibly acute eye. They were very supportive when I decided to go to art college instead of studying marine biology like my older brother. The surrounding family thought I was a bit crazy. They felt I should have gone to university first because art college was a step down in many people’s minds and was treated as a hobby. I had an easy run though, compared with some of the students I’ve taught who had to fight to study art.
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I never worried an awful lot about how I would make a living. I always had this weird faith that the work would bring me through. There were times when I was pretty hard up; I lived in a house in England for three years with only an outdoor toilet. But I knew I had a backup. I could always write to my mother and ask for a loan. I am very aware that I had that.
I don’t think art is about talent really. It’s about a route you take. And it’s not about seeing that route in relation to anybody else’s; it’s not competitive. For me, art was a strange personal addiction to the things I was doing.
When I moved to England in the 1970s, it was around the time of the Birmingham pub bombings so it was not a good place to be. I went to the States next because I wanted to stay out of Ireland; I didn’t feel there was any focus on visual art here. I won £50 in a jewellery competition and I bought a cheap ticket to San Francisco with the old airline Laker Airways. I ended up studying at the San Francisco Art Institute and worked in restaurants to make money.
I think we’re more questioning than a colonial country and that can be chaotic, but there’s a chaos and uncertainty here that I like
— Dorothy Cross
I exhibited in PPOW gallery in New York once but pulled out after a single show because I didn’t feel my work fit in with their aesthetic. It’s really important to show in galleries you love and that understand the way you function. I’ve shown at the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin for 40 years and also at Frith Street Gallery in London. We’re very loyal to each other and they’re both brilliant galleries. Galleries can be like shops, but if a gallery is too much like a shop, it’s not a good gallery. I know they have to work at selling, but it’s a balance.
When Ronald Reagan became president of the US, we all thought it was the biggest joke ever – but look at the horrors that are happening now – so I came back to Ireland. I gave up swimming years ago, but now I scuba dive and that’s how I came to live in Connemara; there’s a brilliant dive centre here at Killary Harbour.
I went to the Venice Biennale in 1993 and it was really lovely. Nobody had been since Pat Scott [the artist represented Ireland in 1960]. I went with a brilliant artist from the North, Willie Doherty, who was creating work of burnt-out cars. There was no pavilion for us so we were in a kind of back alley between Albania and Mauritania. At night, we’d run around the backstreets of Venice posting billboards of burnt-out cars. Willie hung them and I was the lookout. It was fantastic.
I always knew I would come back to Ireland. I think there’s a freedom here that comes from being postcolonial. I think we’re more questioning than a colonial country and that can be chaotic, but there’s a chaos and uncertainty here that I like.
There’s also something about home, something gorgeous about being home. Recently I’ve been working on an artistic project that involves returning the mummified body of an Egyptian man back to Cairo from University College Cork. It took a lot of work, but he went home last December.
It’s so sad to see people seeking refuge in foreign places. They don’t do that out of desire. They want to be at home. It’s a tiny gesture but returning the ancient body was trying to speak to that.
In conversation with Marie Kelly
