Denise de Cordova FRCA MRSS

Describing herself as a ‘kind of Victorian magic realist’, Denise’s work takes the form of tableaux that use specific imagery as a means of exploring historical tropes that centre on ideas of nature, identity, myth and folklore. The specificity of place impacting on knowledge or experience of work has been a long-term feature in Denise’s practice. Exhibitions that focus on the placing of sculptures within existing museum collections include Confluence, The Museum of St John, London, 1995, Pressing Flesh, The Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge, 2001, Salon Particular, St Mark’s Church, Myddelton Square, London, 2011 and Congregation, The Chapel, Jesus College, Cambridge, 2013.

The focus of recent research has been the exploration of ‘strong’ landscape references, in order to consider how first hand encounters with mountain and wilderness question a mythic understanding of place and remoteness. The specificity of place impacting on the experience of work has been a long-term concern in Denise’s work. 

Denise’s sculpture take the form of hand crafted, painted objects that are assembled to create tableaux that incorporate representation and specific imagery as a means of exploring historical tropes and cultural constructs that centre on ideas of identity, landscape, myth and folklore. The female figure, birds, mushrooms, logs and boulders become part of an ongoing distillation of narratives that allude to uneasy alliances: the familiar and the uncanny, the domestic and the wilderness, the fictional and the nonfictional. The important thing is that ideas conflate, that glimpsed moments, whether real or imagined, cohere to become sculptural stagings, evoking a memory or a scene that might be understood as a ‘heightened truth,’ rather than one that is literal. The work is a personal collection of curated moments, where the on  going lexicon of permitted imagery requires first hand experience in order to be ‘allowed’ in the work. A bird, costume or rock has to have been ‘seen’.

Visual sources impact on choices that are made during the production of the sculptures. Console game graphics, with their painstakingly detailed geology, flora and fauna, and illustrated field guides may be of equal importance as Thomas Bewick’s woodcuts, or John James Audubon’s hand tinted engravings; the body proportions of a doll carrying as much meaning as classical Eurocentric sculpture; the palette associated with cosmetic counters in department stores as pertinent as the exquisite painted surfaces of medieval carvings.

At times, these dualities can be tiresome, and to accommodate this, de Cordova occasionally adopts a nom de plume in order to fulfil certain ‘making ‘desires. As Amy Bird, she is creating an on going collection of ceramic heroines. The material specificity of clay, with its pliancy and wetness, is important, allowing for a sensual handling that translates directly into the work. Colour, as glaze, can pour, run or bleed. This contrasts with the drier, highly painted objects more familiar to her practice, where the accumulation of small marks in a large surface is critical, deliberately camouflaging and concealing the true nature of underlying materials, thus becoming the site for fiction, illusion and obsession. What remains common to both bodies of work is the grouping and regrouping of objects to create fluid narratives that adapt to different environments to amplify the enquiry into encoded cultural conventions.

Selected Recent Exhibitions

'Rocks Remember and Other Stories’ 2024, Standpoint, London.

'Collect' 2024 with Jaggedarts,

'Sixth Sense’ 2024,Standpoint Gallery, London.

'Trig Point’ 2024, Kingsgate Project Space, London.

'Vanishings’ 2024 Turps Gallery, London.

'Parked 11’ 2024, St John’s Garden and The Cloister Garden, The Museum of the Order of St John, London.

'Collect 2023, Somerset House, London.

'Hung, Drawn & Quartered’, 2023, Standpoint Gallery, London.

'You Will See Marvellous Things' 2023, Eagle Gallery, London.

'Owl in the Hen Shed’ 2023, Bowen Island, BC, Canada.

'Wood Walkers' 2023, Eagle Gallery, London.

'Dark Eyes' Installation, 2021-2023, Linklaters Law Firm, London.

’Tree Wilder’ 2022-2023, Barnwell Country Park, Northamptonshire.

'Collect', 2022, Jaggedarts, Somerset House, London.

'The Amber Room’ 2022, Reference Point, London.

'The Disoeuvre’ 2022, Ramsgate.

'A Modern Capricho' 2022, Cross Lane Projects, London.

'Grounding’ 2022, Jaggedarts, London.

'Vessel and Form', 2022, Eagle Gallery, London.

'What I Know (Anyway)' 2021, Bloc Projects, Sheffield. Featured Artist (Place Portraits)', Bath Open, 2021, Victoria Gallery, Bath.

'Slingbacks and Sunshine', 2021, Superstore Southside, South London Gallery.

'The Confluence of Congregations' 2021, The Ballroom, The Argentine Ambassadors Residency, London.

'Crafting a Difference' 2021, SoShiro, London.'Don't Touch Me', 2020, Newcombe House, London.

'The Great Wall of Think' 2020, The British School at Rome, Italy.

'The Materiality of Mild Fear: Deep Wood Women and Women Who Have Incidents with Animals’, 2019, Standpoint Gallery London.

• (2012) Curation Collaboration with Stephen Chambers: Mrs Darling’s Kiss at Arch 402, London.
  An exhibition of print, painting, sculpture and an outdoor artist made cinema, featuring work by Joan Ashworth, Louise Bourgeois, Steve Bunn, Tom Chamberlain, Stephen Chambers, Denise de Cordova, Kate Davis & David Moore, Dexter Dymoke, Jonas Grimas, Jane Harris, Tim Long, Rosa Loy, Lee Maelzer, Nicholas Pankhurst, Kate Rowles, Fiona Shaw and Mike Taylor.
  
• (2013 and 2014) International Judge for Prix MAIF pour la Sculpture in Paris.
  
• (2016) External panel member for the Periodic Review of the BA Hons Art and Design and BA Hons Fine Art Courses within the Institute of humanities and Creative Arts at the University of Worcester.