Looking at Stella Corkery’s paintings I’m caught in a rushing promiscuity of response. I feel as I did a few decades ago when failing to learn to ski; I kept sliding very fast down the slope without being able to stand and get any dignified purchase on the hard snow. I couldn’t stand up for falling down. Turning Corkery’s paintings over in my mind, I feel I am sliding into them with steering wander as they turn me over, set me reeling, and push me down their slopes. The mixed register of Corkery’s capriciously eclectic and skittish pictorial motifs contribute to the effect of assertive mutability, but mostly it is her paintings’ giddy gesturality, their distracted plasticity, their curdling painterly lyricism, their weird cuisine. Corkery must lace her smeared, scraped, whorled, and variously palpated mediums with something strong.

– Allan Smith

“I look at how to push paint around as a verb activity, as something totally pragmatic: to scrape, to push … it’s how my painting vocabulary developed. A practical, material way of moving paint across a surface.”

– Stella Corkery

“The push of the brush, the weight of the bristles, the hardness, the softness, there are all these kind of material details in using a brush that will result in what happens on the surface.”

– Stella Corkery