Denise de Cordova was invited by the Works of Art Committee at Jesus College, Cambridge to mount a solo exhibition of recent work in the unique setting of the College’s 12th century chapel.
The exhibition focuses on over twenty ceramic figures that de Cordova has made under her nom de plume Amy Bird - a character she created in order to explore the possibilities of working in clay. Amy Bird makes only women - works that refer to historical figures, heroines of literature and cultural models.
The installation at Jesus College reflects a sense of staging and arranging that is a distinctive feature of de Cordova’s practice, which plays with re-grouping individual sculptural elements to create shifting meanings and narratives.
The work was sited in response to the stained glass windows designed by Edward Burne Jones and Ford Madox Brown which were installed as part Pugin’s redevelopment of the Chapel. This continues the artist’s interest in placing her sculptures in situations other than conventional white cube spaces. The intention was to explore the relationships that might exist between 19th Century Gothic Revival imagery and that employed by the artist in her own sculptures.