Now open at the Gyeonggi Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Art, Serena Korda presents work from her series 'The Maidens'.
Korda’s recent practice has centred around a process of worldbuilding, creating an ever-evolving environment for the protagonist at the centre of her own fiction – a Giantess, based on the Greek siren Parthenope, who’s monumental oceanic necklace And She Cried me a River (2021) recently showed in ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ curated by Jenni Lomax at Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples and the Hayward Gallery’s ‘Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art.’ In this 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. Peripheral characters, the handmaidens aided Penelope in the daily weaving and unravelling of a funeral shroud - a cunning strategy to put off the suitors that accumulated in Odysseus’s absence. Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Penelopiad’, focuses upon the untold female perspectives within this familiar myth. Similarly, Korda reviews the narrative through a feminist lens, placing the maidens centre stage, their murder the ultimate expression of their lack of agency.
