Everest Shark

This artwork featured in Time Will Tell (2013). A Meadow Arts commission.

During a residency in 2012, Dorothy repositioned Croft in the context of geologic time, which is so often overlooked in favour of human time. The area around Croft Castle is highly significant in the discovery of the Silurean period; 420 million years ago the first plants emerged on land whilst the first fish with jaws and teeth appeared: the Croft area holds the evidence of how the first shark-like predators developed.

In terms of our landscape’s familiar shape as we know it today, Mount Everest rose to be the highest mountain peak 60 million years ago, while other mountains, like the gentle hills seen from the terrace of Croft Castle, were broken and eroded. Dorothy’s artwork fused this history into one strange standing: an enigmatic shark whose dorsal fin has mutated into the Himalayan mountain range.

The artwork was cast in bronze from the body of a blue shark that was abandoned in a freezer in Northern Ireland after the ban on selling shark meat came into effect. Swipe through for a glimpse of casting a real shark and the extraordinary transformation from molten material to finished artwork.

Image: Everest Shark, Dorothy Cross, installation view, cast shark, Time Will Tell, Croft Castle, 2013. Image courtesy of Meadow Arts. Photographer, Rebecca Farkas.

 

About the artist

Dorothy Cross

Dorothy Cross exhibited in Time will Tell, Croft Castle 2013, commissioned by Meadow Arts.

Image: Everest Shark, Dorothy Cross, installation view, Time Will Tell, Croft Castle, 2013. Image courtesy of Meadow Arts. Photographer, Rebecca Farkas.