For many years, de Cordova has been walking, often alone in the deep woods and forest spaces of British Colombia, visiting First Nation and Settler communities as part of an ongoing preoccupation with wilderness and remoteness. Through her work, de Cordova considers how the idea of the female figurative sculpture can express landscape narratives, intercultural exchange and blended identities that draw upon European and non-European sources which allude to terra mater mythologies and folk traditions.
Denise’s sculpted wooden characters appear to have popped out of a children’s book. Each piece is based on a real person, hand crafted and painted, sometimes carrying objects, charms or accessories. With her works, Denise explores ideas of identity, landscape, myth and folklore. Her female figures - sometimes staged in small mis-en-scenes with birds, mushrooms, logs and boulders - become part of an ongoing distillation of narratives that allude to uneasy alliances: the familiar and the uncanny, the domestic and the wilderness, the fictional and the nonfictional. Whether real or imagined, they become sculptural stagings, evoking a memory or a scene that might be understood as a ‘heightened truth,’ rather than one that is literal. The work is a personal collection of curated moments, stories or people, triggering singular emotions in the viewer.