Corinna Button

"There will be time, there will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; time for you and time for me,

and time for yet a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred revision before the taking of a toast and tea in the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo"

T.S Elliot

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Corinna's work explores the female psyche and its response to a rapidly changing digital world. The narratives in her paintings are deep and found through excavation of the paint layers. The faces seem to portray the ‘self’ whilst viewed in time and motion. This ‘self’ caught in action tells a story which shifts from past to present, a countenance carved into materials or painted directly like a fresco. The subject looks out at us, often two tone, steeped in romantic connotations as an old sepia photograph or a black and white silent film. There are layers of lace and impasto matter that draw us in further to a haunting awareness of her fragility. She is poised and the flickering fragmented face is occasionally uneasy. This reminds us of all the selfies we’ve ever taken while hiding all the feelings. There’s a sense of us as Automatons seeking something in our cyber society, in Buttons own words these are; “manifestations of a number of different ideas about identity and stereotype.”

Sergio Gromez writing a review for her show in Chicago in May 2017 said “To see and to understand are two very different things. One sees but one does not always understand what one sees. This is more evident in today’s rapidly changing world with all its complexities of social interaction both on and off the screen. Button’s multi-face personalities pose and embrace the moment as if they are waiting for a “selfie” in every direction. They are not taken by surprised. Instead, they graciously move and take a stand. Such is the new reality and banality of the social media revolution that perhaps, to look at Button’s work is to look at ourselves in the mirror. And by doing so, we realise that although we are able to see more of the world at once, we are actually understanding less of it.”