The opening reception will be on Saturday 6 June for London Gallery Weekend.
The artist will be in conversation at 12pm & 3pm, coffee & English sparkling wine will be served all afternoon.
In The Golem Rises, Serena Korda’s second solo exhibition at Cooke Latham, the artist explores the transformative power of motherhood and the wild, elemental energy of creation while acknowledging the societal pressure to subsequently narrow, contain, and domesticate the self.
At the heart of the exhibition is an allegorical ceramic frieze that reimagines the Golem’s creation, a story Korda has used to converse with her six-year-old daughter about mixed identity, inherited histories, and survival. Originating in Jewish folklore, the figure of the Golem is an animated anthropomorphic being created entirely from inanimate matter, usually clay or mud. Entwined with this story is the reclamation of the woodwose of medieval tapestries, a figure most often depicted as male, and more rarely as monstrous ‘wild’ woman. In reworking this trope, these wild women are transformed into embodiments of a powerful, untamed creative force, celebrated for their instinct to protect themselves through the act of building a golem. Yet, as the myth reminds us, the golem ultimately turns on the community that summoned it, complicating the fragile boundary between protection and threat, a vehicle for both personal and collective reflection.
Korda actively plays with the language of domesticity. The ceramic frieze is compiled of tiles, while across the gallery two domestically scaled ceramic lamps ‘speak’ to each other across the room. Referencing and paying homage to numerous cultures, the lamps take the form of two strong primal mother figures while the bulbs flash intermittently, spelling ‘MOTHER’ in morse code. A tongue in cheek play with the idea of mother tongue it acknowledges the crucial maternal role in forming language and identity. There is an urgency to the communication – do they signal to remind us of their presence or are they in fact signalling a warning.
By conjuring a mythic city of women and merging it with the enduring science-fiction power of the Golem, Korda positions maternal creation as both elemental and political, wild and protective. The work reframes motherhood as a site of radical power, imagination, and survival.
