For The Armory Show 2023 Cooke Latham Gallery presented a ceramic installation by British artist Serena Korda. The works are an extension of Serena's series 'The Maidens', which exhibited at the gallery earlier in the year.
Korda’s recent practice centres around a process of worldbuilding, creating an ever-evolving environment for the protagonist at the centre of her own fiction – a Giantess, who’s monumental oceanic necklace And She Cried me a River (2022) recently showed in the Hayward Gallery’s ‘Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art.’ In this new series Korda expands upon the world of this imagined giantess, building her a spectral female entourage inspired by Penelope’s twelve handmaidens in the Odyssey. Korda reviews the narrative through a feminist lens, placing the maidens centre stage, their murder the ultimate expression of their lack of agency.
Influenced by the palette of majolica pottery and the garish colours that would have originally embellished classical marble sculptures, the installation comprised of several human scaled headdresses and helmets. The absent heads will be presented as though in an early 20th Century milliners or glove shop display, accompanied by ‘mannequin-like’ dismembered limbs. Referencing the excesses and confines of numerous different eras of female attire ‘The Maidens’ become mutable time travellers; ghosts that question the societal confines of today.
Cooke Latham Gallery's presentation follows a year of institutional exposure for Korda with her work included in exhibitions at both the Hayward Gallery and Somerset House in 2022, and an Arts Council Collection acquisition in 2023.
‘How Strange and yet how logical is it that so many of our metaphors for storytelling are drawn from the discursive field of textile production. We weave plots, spin stories, fabricate tales and tell yarns as a re- minder of how the work of our hands produced social spaces that promoted the exchange of stories’
Maria Tatar, The Heroine with 1001 Faces
