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.
For further details please contact us by email: emmahilleagle@aol.com
or call + 44 (0)7968 538 458
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