ROCKS REMEMBER AND OTHER STORIES
Denise De Cordova
8 November – 7 December 2024
Standpoint Gallery, 45 Coronet Street, London N1 6HD
In my head I walk with companions, both real and fictitious. They are my dryads and huntresses of the classical world, but also new companions from the deep woods, especially fog/volcano woman with her mercurial mood swings. They are the characters that exist in the spaces between the trees, mysteries that shape shift and flicker on the edge of perception. Barely caught, and barely seen. (Denise de Cordova)
Eagle Gallery / EMH Arts, London and Standpoint Gallery are delighted to present Denise de Cordova’s solo exhibition Rocks Remember and Other Stories.
De Cordova’s work plays with ambiguities – there is a tension between notions of surface embellishment being at odds with what lies beneath. By grouping and regrouping objects, her narratives adapt fluidly to different environments.
Within their fabricated forms and painted surfaces, her sculptures hold allusions to many literary genres, from magical realism, landscape writing and classical novels, to ancient myth and tales from folklore. She describes the work as the embodiment of real and imagined space, a nexus for lived experience, re-readings, and collected stories.
She has consistently explored ideas through the prism of female figurative forms that carry reiterated motifs: rocks, rauks, gogottes, stones, sticks – objects that imply women’s burdens, but also innate and transgressive power, where non-human sentience is valued as kinship.
Rocks Remember and Other Stories presents work developed from recent solitary forest walks in British Columbia, Canada, and a summer residency at The British School Of Rome, where de Cordova extended research into Cybele, who had a dual role as goddess of civilisation’s order and nature’s chaos, and who came to earth in the form of a meteorite.
Meteorites are a prominent metaphor in the current exhibition as symbols of prophesy, omen and wonder. In Greek mythology, meteorites are associated with weightlessness, or suspension between heaven and earth. De Cordova’s sculptural characters echo this – neither fully grounded in reality, nor entirely abstract – ‘the real unreal’, in her own words. Her work embodies a form of suspension – between primal, instinctual forces and structured aspects of human identity and culture; a seeking of a wildness that exists in the everyday, in the city, the forest, or the mind.
The exhibition highlights de Cordova’s multi-disciplinary practice as an artist. As a Fellow and part time tutor of more than 30 years at the Royal College of Art, she has also been an influential teacher to younger generations of artists. She is currently a subject of the ‘Artists Lives’, an oral history project, part of the National Life Stories at the British Library.
The exhibition is open Thursday – Saturday, 12 – 5pm, and by appointment.
For further details please contact us by email: emmahilleagle@aol.com
or call + 44 (0)7968 538 458
FRAGILE STORIES
Mandy Bonnell and Déirdre Kelly
14 June – 8 January 2025
Museo del Merletto, Venice
Fragile Stories by Mandy Bonnell and Déirdre Kelly explores the historical practice of domestic lace-making, paying tribute to the extraordinary skill of its anonymous, female practitioners. Almost six years in development the exhibition features contemporary works made in response to artefacts held in the archives of the Palazzo Mocenigo and the outstanding lace collection held at the Museo del Merletto.
Fragile Stories expresses the desire to embrace and participate in the rich creativity of the female hand, attuned to the delicate rhythms of nature and often – like lace itself – far stronger than it seems. It is a conversation with lace makers of the past that touches on issues of fragility and durability, manifested in delicate objects and beautiful traceries cut into fine papers and geographical maps.
Bonnell’s Imparaticci pages and lace ‘hems’ originate in the pin-pricked sampler books that were passed down in families from generation to generation as the templates for lace patterns. Her drawings bear references to traditional floral designs such as the Venetian ‘Punta Rosa’ motif and to the repetitive rhythms of stitching that are expressed in her work as grids of tiny pencil marks.
Kelly’s intricate, cut paper sculptures are fashioned into the shapes of stoles, collars, cuffs, gloves and babies shoes that are shown alongside examples of antique originals. Working with found paper maps she locates the objects in relation to areas renowned for the quality of their lace-making crafts and, in particular, to Venice.
Museo del Merletto
Burano, Piazza Galuppi, 187, 30142 Venezia (VE) Italy www.museomerletto.visitmuve.it
(Open 10.00 – 16.00 Closed Mondays)
