Serena Korda

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 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. 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.

This Giant Necklace for an imagined mermaid begins a body of work that inhabits a near future world. Exploring female representation in Western Mythology my giant female protagonist reconsiders stories in our collective unconscious whilst giving agency to the often unspoken and silenced female voices.

‘Ruffle My Hair’ was a solo show that continued to walk in the footsteps of my giant female protagonist and her imagined world. At the centre of this show is her divinatory pendulum ‘Basket Star’ which echoes the spiralling, tentacular arms of the deep sea creature by the same name. In this work I was rethinking the deathly gaze of Medusa recasting her as a victim raped by Poseidon, punished by Athena and then decapitated by Perseus.

When asked to work on the flag commission at Somerset House my first thoughts were that a flag makes visible the air around us, how it moves and shifts throughout the day.  Air is something that we can perceive through feel but essentially it is an element that remains invisible to us and however fundamental to our survival is easily overlooked. This seeming invisibility creates this elements place in mythology and phenomenology as the spirit of primordial Gods.  For this reason my immediate thoughts were about how I could make the wind and air the centre piece of this work, inviting the viewer to go on a sonic journey using the flag as a visual cue to focus on the very element that is making it move and dance before our eyes.

I started to research Khaos one of the primordial God’s actually the first representing “The gaping void” between Heaven and Earth that gave birth to the orphic egg from which all the other primordial gods were born. Khaos is described as the lower atmosphere which surrounds earth, the invisible gloom of fog and mist.

Clairaudience literally translates as clear hearing and is the psychic ability to hear things in the spirit world, also known as psychic hearing. This new work for the Tetley takes its starting point from a series of notions about the resonance of spaces and what they might reveal through the act of “Deep Listening” and field recording.  Todmorden in the West Yorkshire Moors is a place of many UFO sightings, animal mutilations and activities of an unexplained nature.  Todmorden’s paranormal  histories were the inspiration for a new sound exploration of our ability to hear things that aren’t necessarily there. Field recordings were combined with the live feed of a homemade dipole radio telescope whilst also exploring my interest in the phenomenological sounds of the glass harp first used in the 18th century by composers such as Mozart.  This ethereal sound of playing the rim of glasses is connected with elevating moods but also with causing hysteria in its player and its listeners. 

The Lore of the Land grew out of conversations with the Collective, a group made up of community members and staff at the Horniman Museum, sharing our experiences of nature and discussing the notion of plant and water consciousness. Whilst engaging with marginalised scientific thinkers and philosophers who inspired our exploration of the Horniman Anthropological Collections. This was the inaugural exhibition of the Studio a new commissioning space at the Horniman Museum and Gardens inviting artists to engage with the community and the world famous collection.  I created a new multi- sensory installation entitled Sensitive Chaos combining sound, sculpture and smell whilst co-curating with the Collective over 100 objects from the Horniman Collection.  

The Bell Tree is a sound sculpture made up of over 300 porcelain mushroom bells that hang from an old oak in the ancient woodland at National Trust Property, Speke Hall in Liverpool.  Inspired by the fairy folklore of the native bluebells that grow beneath its branches, The Bell Tree celebrates the dark side of the fairy kingdom. Exploring the spirit of this ancient site and the power of myth embodied in this most protected of English flowers. 

You are invited to stand in front of The Bell Tree, watch the bells move in the breeze and then, through listening to the soundscape audio which can be downloaded here https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/speke-hall-garden-and-estate/features/the-bell-tree, immerse yourself in the ringing of bluebells played by the bell ringers of Garston St. Michael’s Church. These melodic sounds are accompanied by an angry band of fairies, performed by local choir Mostly Madrigals and a capella group Mouthful.

Missing Time is the result of a two year Norma Lipman and BALTIC fellowship at Newcastle University.  During this time I was interested in considering how to make invisible forces palpable and create an environment of care in a world that is turning on itself.  During the fellowship I took inspiration from my surroundings and the people that I met.  Drawn to the concrete acoustic sound mirrors that dot the North East coastline – once used to detect the sound of enemy planes until the invention of radar made them obsolete – and the sound of stars from the dark skies of Northumberland that are only audible with specific radio devices.  Inspired by these different ways of listening, the potential healing power of sound and their use as a way of communicating, I created a series of large ceramic dish-shaped portals that act as resonators and an accompanying sound work that explore communication with the infinite cosmos.

Daughters of Necessity: Serena Korda and Wakefield’s Ceramics

The Hepworth Wakefield is home to a rich and eclectic collection of ceramics, including work by many of the most celebrated potters, ceramicists and sculptors of the 20th and 21st centuries. For this exhibition, I selected pieces from the collection to display alongside my own works.

The title of the exhibition was taken from an essay written for Wakefield Art Gallery in the 1950s. Charting relationships between the handmade and the industrially produced, the author Hugh Gordon Porteus refers to pottery as ‘one of the very first, rough working daughters of Necessity’. He suggests that early clay vessels were made in response to domestic needs, with no special importance placed on aesthetic or ritual value. In the context of a white-walled art gallery, the status of an object becomes more complex. What does it mean to place a pot on a shelf, or on a plinth for display?

“Hold Fast, Stand Sure, I scream a revolution” is a sound sculpture created for Reid Gallery and Comar as part of Glasgow International 2016.  It combines my interest in primitive impulses, invented tradition and our skewed relationship to nature.  Taking my inspiration from the politically radical history of Garnethill (the surrounding area of the Reid Gallery), whilst considering the geographical significance of The Isle of Mull as a portal to the underworld.  I continue my investigation in to “thin places” anomalies in the landscape which were viewed inpre - Christian times as access points to the afterlife.  Garnethill is situated on a drumlin, a village like community nestled on a steep hill in the centre of Glasgow which has seen the rise of The Glasgow Girls, the Scottish suffrage movement, The Women’s Library and The Third Eye Centre (now the CCA).

An army of ceramic warriors lies in wait, wounded, amputated and punctured. These warriors have travelled the country  being sung into by different choirs in Edinburgh (Rhubaba Choir), Oxford and Cardiff.  The Jug Choir is an unfolding sonic experiment that evolves with each set of singers who come to the jugs.

“Blood thickening bass rattles our chests, carrying us out of the woods, dancing, crying, sweating, laughing, pounding, shouting, clapping.”*

On Sunday 30th August 2015 a rave boat travelled upstream from Neyland Marina to Haverfordwest, carrying a massive sound system that played Black Diamond, an electronic music track made with the people of Haverfordwest and composed by Andy Wheddon.  

Mandolin players plucking at Port Lion, mysterious methane fizzing at Black Tar, a trombonist making elephant howls in the ruins of Boulston Manor.  Histories of place and people converge with the early 90s rave culture of West Wales. Bringing the Western Cleddau to life on a high tide that breached the banks of Haverfordwest.

A performance as part of Copenhagen Art Week 2014, Sydhavn Station. Featuring Sandy Smith, Rasmus Knutzen Nielsen, Johan Grann, Peter Følsgaard, Aske Høier Olsen and Michael Richardt. With music by Terkel Nørgaard.

Aping the Beast used animal symbolism and folklore to explore our fear of the unknown and how we have evolved to confront these fears through imitation, spectacle, ritual and humour.  At the centre of Aping the Beast was a 15 ft latex Godzilla inspired monster, which was bought to life three times over the course of the exhibition.  The Awakening, convened local school children dressed as Boggarts, wizened old men from Lancashire folklore, to bring the Beast to life.  The Fertility Orbit of the Boob Meteorite, was the Beast’s first sexual encounter with a multi-boobed goddess who performed her fertility rite, shot her load and died.Aping the Beast: The Procession, saw a procession of all the characters from previous performances join the Beast at Whitestone Pond, the highest point in London, a small man-made pond at the centre of a gyratory system.  Spectators witnessed the Beast at loggerheads with two battleships.  This was a re-enactment of an aquatic finale performed in 1940 that I found a written account of in the archives of Blackpool Tower Circus. 

The show toured to The Grundy Blackpool and drew upon the spectacle and carnival of this infamous seaside resort.

Inspired by the hollywood black cat auditions of 1961 to find the perfect cat to appear alongside Vincent Price in 'Tales of Terror', I decided to hold my own auditioning process to find the star of my film 'The Prognosticator'.  Following an open call for participants I visited people's houses to photograph their black cats armed with my set housed inside a large suitcase.  The audition tested the cat’s ability to sit in front of a camera and to find the most majestic feline for the demanding lead role of a psychic black cat.

The Transmitters, examines the thin line between fan frenzy, freedom of expression and female hysteria.  A group of women dance to music performed by two musicians bearing prosthetic ‘third eyes’. The choreography of this cult-like ritual is inspired by archival footage of fan-frenzied young women enraptured by Beatlemania. These scenes are spliced with terrifying images of the deadly Tarantula spider  which alludes to the Italian folk phenomenon the Tarantism, historically  performed as an antidote to the potentially fatal venom of a spider’s bites.

The Prognosticator is a sculptural film installation that features in “Aping the Beast”.

The film emerged from a series of ‘Black Cat Auditions’ in which I visited people’s homes to photograph their black cat in order to find one that was compliant with the filming process. In the resulting film the relationship between Boo Cat – a majestic black feline character – and his doting owner, is suggestive of the familiar spirits that accompany practitioners of folk magic. The camera zooms in and out hypnotically focusing on Boo Cat’s eyes evoking the remote Russian healers who channelled supernatural powers through television broadcasts, during the collapes of the Soviet Union.

I was invited to Barton Hill back in June 2011 and as we walked around the estate, which had undergone a massive regeneration programme, I was struck by the invisibility of its history.  Apart from the entrance columns  to the trading estate and two small barn-like constructions on either side, nothing remains of The Great Western Cotton Mill that once employed most of Barton Hill’s inhabitants.  The workers’ slum housing was demolished in the 1950’s and swiftly replaced by the iconic high-rise tower blocks that form the hub of the estate.  Whilst the Netham Chemical Works are buried beneath what is now the Netham Park, a vast green open space (that became the site of the W.A.M.A dance),  allowing us to forget the mountains of ‘Galligu’ chemical waste that children once frolicked and played in.  This waste ground became known locally as the “Brillos” where heaps of waste would build up to form what has been described as a lunar landscape.  There are very few signifiers hinting to this industrial past, a time of child labour and the forgotten art of meemoing, the cotton mill workers’ invented sign language that had developed as a means of communicating in a deafening environment.  

Although these are all welcome improvements to people’s living and working conditions, it made me feel that perhaps regeneration comes at the cost of making the past somewhat invisible.  W.A.M.A was inspired by a desire to make Barton Hill’s rich industrial heritage visible once again through an invented folk dance based on people’s working movements.  Before developing W.A.M.A I had staged several invented folk dances that were concerned with revealing abandoned histories.  Through W.A.M.A I had a chance to achieve a desire that had been brewing to create a ritual dance for a community, which has the potential to be restaged in the future.

Dust is everywhere, it is part of us and the smallest of visible particles. “Laid to Rest” continues my fascination with the overlooked by transforming dust collected from houses, businesses and institutions into 500 commemorative bricks.

Inspired by the commercialization of waste in Victorian London from the dust heaps of Gray’s Inn Rd to the engineering achievements of Joseph Bazalgette’s sewage system. The dust heaps were monuments to the invisible and provided a major source of income. One of the industries to be born out of the heaps was London brick making: ash, cinders and rubbish from the heaps were mixed with the mud of nearby brick fields to produce the humble brick.

Each brick made as part of “Laid to Rest” contains specific dust from the contributing house, business or institution mixed in to clay. Imprinted on each brick are the contributor’s initials cataloguing their transformation from the barely visible to the palpable.

The brick stack grew over the course of the exhibition and a mythical marching band “The Brick Keepers” consecrated the bricks combining choral incantations and ritual dance in a tribute to the overlooked and forgotten.

Training through Production, R.A.D.A.R commission

Inspired by Loughborough University’s history of training through production, and the Loughborough University archive material depicting images of mass movement; I made a new work involving a mass movement choir. Developed in the 1930s in Germany by Rudolf Laban, it employed the synchronised movement of a large group of people in outdoor locations, and has been adopted by many political groups to embody the spirit of community against adversity.

Training through Production drew upon Loughborough’s rich history of utopian industrialism, epitomized by Herbert Schofield, principle of The University between 1915 and 1950.  The invented folk dance at the heart of the work was developed with the help of its participants, all amateur dance enthusiasts, and choreographer Rosie Heafford. During  rehearsals the notion of finding choreography in the everyday underpinned the work’s development, with each participant contributing their own daily rituals to the dance’s evolution. The final performance moved from pitch to pitch by a procession, culminating at the Carillon playing a new composition by Daniel O’Sullivan, played by Caroline Sharpe.

Everyday on my way to work I used to pass a derelict house, No 7 Bruce Grove. The house is boarded up and in disrepair, it has been like this for over 20 years, people stand in front of it waiting for the 243 bus completely unaware of its significance. I only became aware of its meteorological importance when I noticed a blue plaque commemorating one of its early inhabitants Luke Howard: the namer of clouds. I was captivated by the plaque and the idea that one person had been responsible for naming this most transient and ephemeral of things, clouds. I embarked upon a series of performances celebrating the romantic and scientific notions that propelled Howard’s amateur enquiries. This culminated in a guided tour of clouds in the collection of Tate Britain, bringing together meteorologists, historians and cloud enthusiasts. Including contributions from: John E Thornes (author of John Constable’s Skies: a fusion of art and science), Giles Harrison and Maarten Aubaum (meteorologists from Reading University), Howard and Sylvia Oliver (on the history of Luke Howard) and Gavin Pretor-Pinney (founder of The Cloud Appreciation Society).

The guided tour culminated in me turning into a cloud.

Inside a kitchen cabinet lies the complex geology of a Mountain, from its highest peak to its deepest crevice. Atop, around and inside this mountain we follow the fictional meeting of Walt Disney and 19th century forgotten female explorer Annie Smith Peck. Driven by ideas of representation, authenticity and the fake “There’s a Strange Wind Blowing” examines the space between illusion and reality whilst exposing process. Does the audience choose to suspend their disbelief even though the puppeteers are in full view? Or do they choose to focus on the mechanics of illusion and wish fulfilment being laid bare before them? Inspired by the urban myth that Disney was cryogenically frozen after his death, the show unfolds to tell the tale of two people obsessed with time, self–preservation and man’s pursuit to conquer nature.

Original score by Daniel O’Sullivan

I discovered Decosa whilst on a residency in the Czech Republic, this thin polystyrene sheeting printed with a wood grain effect, is a very convincing fake. Decosa is popular in Bohemia and Germany, giving a pseudo chalet-feel to any room in your house. I bought a pack containing 12 thin planks and used it to construct a huge block of wood, although slightly incongruous it looked like solid wood but was as light as a feather.

The Library of Secrets is a mobile library conceived from the love of keeping and finding things in amongst the pages of books. Two confessional booths at either end of the structure invite you to leave your thoughts, wisdoms and secrets amongst the pages of one or more of the 400 books in the library’s collection. Peruse the shelves for your favourite 19th or 20th century classic or maybe just rummage through the books to find other peoples secrets.

Between 2007-2008 The Library took up residence in different venues across Whitstable as part of Whitstable Biennale 2008. For a whole year The Library of Secrets hosted a series of events including the Book Club Debate, which met every 6 weeks. The Book Club focused on discussing books that inspired the films, local hero Peter Cushing, starred in including; Dracula, Lolita, The Hound of the Baskerville’s, Frankenstein, Nineteen Eighty Four and The End of the Affair. These classics are more often imbedded in our knowledge through their film adaptation rather than the original novel. The Book Club Debates were chaired by myself and a host of visiting experts, lively debate was followed by a screening of the film each book inspired. The Book Club Debate was documented through a series of book reviews written by myself and members of the Book Club.

What connects picturesque parklands, melodic choral music and beautiful bowling greens?

The answer is Stanmore, a town with a wartime secret. In 1942 Stanmore was the home to an undisclosed outstation that was built to house 57 Turing Bomb machines; the technology used by Britain’s World War Two code breakers at Bletchley Park to decipher the German Enigma code.

Art on the Underground commissioned me to create a project for Stanmore Station (at the end of the Jubilee line). I was inspired by Stanmore’s connection to Bletchley Park and discovered that some code breakers had been recruited for their ability to solve The Daily Telegraph crossword in under 12 minutes. London Underground also has a wartime connection to crosswords. During the Blitz millions sheltered in the Underground stations and London Transport used crossword puzzles on the reverse of information leaflets to help keep people entertained.

Building the Matterhorn, is about man's absurd desire to conquer nature, whilst examining the relationship between photography and authenticity.

A crucifix rested on his forearm.  Bleary blue black lines constructing a memorial to his mother.  It moved, stretching and pulling as he lifted the pint to his mouth.  Jimmy started to talk and so the rest followed.  Each one with at least one tattoo emblazoned on their person.  The soft glow of the fruit machine reflected on their exposed skin, illuminating a proclamation of love or allegiance.

And so began a series entitled Old Mens Flesh a catalogue of encounters with strangers. Focusing on the male drinking culture, the project uses men's tattoos’ as a starting point for entering into conversation.  As tattoos are collected they are transferred and archived on to a tablecloth. The marks are faded and blurry like the tattoos, allowing for different interpretations. People are then invited to the cloth and in exchange for tea, cake and beer, are asked to stitch the tattoos. The act of stitching reflects the act of tattooing.  Every stitch like every prick of the flesh, fastening and embedding a yearning or a memory.