Halifax-based artist Jessica Korderas describes her artwork simply – “small dioramas encased in plastic”. But such a simple description doesn’t do justice to the entire lifetime she is able to breathe into a single, bite-sized resin piece.
Korderas specializes in capturing the magic of a single moment set apart from many. This is often done through her use of designing single rooms and cramming them with detail and cultural references to form a narrative. She does this by layering resin over hand-painted and drawn details that she spaces out to add dimension to the piece.
“It’s always a little hard to describe to people, but I usually describe my pieces as small dioramas encased in plastic. I build the setting first – usually either a singe room or the cross-section of an entire building – then build up the scene with layers and layer of resin. All the figures and objects in the scene are drawn, painted, and then cut out so they can be placed in the different layers creating a sort of low-relief effect. All my pieces are very heavy on narrative, and have been described as a mix between theatre set maquettes and animation cells.”
They become like a Wes Anderson film inside of a bottle, and we become the omniscience voyeurs of these intimate miniaturized scenes. They are literally small moments that might not have even registered in our own lives but become a sort of keepsake reminder in Korderas’s encapsulated format.
Her affinity for working with resin wasn’t something that initially came to her. During her time at Mount Allison University, she studied all kinds of disciplines before settling on resin in her last year.
“At the time very few people were working with resin so I had to develop my own methods and ways of working through a lot of trial and error,” said Korderas. “A lot of trial and error! It took me years to really get good with the medium, and even to this day I am always developing and discovering new techniques.”
Korderas explains that culture plays a huge role in her pieces. Everything from pop culture to history to nature to science makes its way into her work. Because of this, she is constantly consuming information and sorting through it to find what is going to inspire her next piece.
One bathtub scene in particular stands out as an homage to The Dreamers, the novel-turned-film by Gilbert Adair. If there is anything that epitomizes Korderas’s work it is this simple, intimate moment taken from a story that sees filmmaking as voyeurism.
“In series like ‘Utopia’ and ‘Dystopia’ that I did a few years ago, the point was to draw from as wide a range of sources as I could. Scenes were inspired by movies, literature, news stories, history, art, cartoons, poetry, scientific theories, the natural world, and more. The point was to illustrate the vastly different elements that exist in one society.”
Perhaps this is why she works such grueling hours. From the painstaking process of layering the resin, creating the details and finding fresh inspiration, Korderas never really takes a day off. She works at least eight hours a day from her home studio, but can work up to fourteen when she’s on a deadline for a show. For that, she’s thankful to be able to work from home.
With the larger buildings taking a few months to complete and the smaller pieces still requiring almost a month, Korderas says that she often works on several pieces concurrently, but it’s hard to tell how much time goes into one
“I usually take a break in the afternoon to recharge, and the nice thing about working from home is the flexibility of the schedule. Especially when you work in a creative discipline, I think you need breaks to come back with fresh eyes.”
Korderas’s newest venture, which is being funded through a grant from Arts Nova Scotia, will be a recreation of various streets inspired by the North End of Halifax. Using her new knowledge of laser-cutting technology, Korderas hopes to create even more detailed architecture than before.
“I wanted to really push the theme of reality vs the surreal,” said Korderas. “So the exteriors will be meticulously recreated from the real houses, while the interiors will push the surreal imagery I’ve used in similar pieces, inspired again from a broad range of cultural sources.”
Korderas says that she is keeping the completion date of the new project intentionally vague, but when they’re ready they’ll be shown somewhere in Halifax’s North End even if it means a pop-up shop.