Corinne Lewis

Fashion, females, fabric and jewellery are the aesthetic concerns of Lewis’ work. The setting is firmly rooted in the film and literary noirs of the 40s and 50s.

Each work takes place in close and intimate interiors dominated by a solitary female figure. The dim artificial lighting is evocative of a city at night.

This is a city populated with femme fatales often in an ambiguous state of dress or undress. Hardboiled men are ever absent from the scene or just out of picture but their presence is recurrently implied.

The works ooze sensuality and glamour but are often underscored by a darker narrative. Where there is a narrative it is always obscured, much like the female form adorned in clothing and jewellery.

This is a highly stylized vision of femininity suggesting both fragility and sexual power. It is an ephemeral vision set in an epoch where all popular cultural ideas about femininity were about to shatter into the feminist resurgence of the 1960s.

Artworks