Penny Goring - Penny World

It’d be all too easy to make a non-committal glance towards the plush sculptures and child-like drawings and decide your time is better spent at the cafe that sits awkwardly between two floors showcasing thirty years of Penny Goring’s trauma. Don’t.

Often headless figures, with amputated arms and elongated legs, and paintings made with food dye are interspersed with ink drawings that would make a parent run straight to the school psychologist.

Limbs contorted. Eyes blackened and bruised. Is this abuse or self-harm? Tears, pain, occasional moments of ecstasy. There’s an overwhelming sense of stress emanating from these illustrations, drawn in a style best described as “strung-out Quentin Blake”.

In case you misinterpret the visuals, unavoidably large wall titles leave little to the imagination:

Fear

Random nasty

Please make me love you

Doom Tree

Blue Murder Doll

Amelia Dead Inside Me

Room after room of raw pain drips from the walls. Soft chairs in a darkened room appear to offer respite, until Penny’s voice bombards you with a list of every anxiety you never even knew you had.

It’s relentless and exhausting and it’s only 90 seconds, but the last line made me laugh. So did the wall-sized images containing silly non-sequiturs (Image 8). I’m pleased to encounter moments of levity scattered throughout the show. If we can’t laugh in our darkest times, then what is life worth living for?

But the most telling work may be “Those who live without torment (red 4) 2020” (Image 9). This small, bright, colourful painting depicting fluid abstract shapes has a visual ambiguity that sets it apart from the distinctly drawn emotions in all her other works. I squint and think I see a woman wearing a crown, but it’s impossible to say.

Like an awkward pause in a conversation, it’s given it’s own small room with a bench. I sat and stared, wondering and worrying if the artist herself is simply unable to visualise what a life without torment actually looks like.


At the ICA (@icalondon) until 18 Sept

Visit the Penny Goring page at Arcadia Missa for more info on the artist


Previous
Previous

Contemporary British Portrait Painters

Next
Next

Women Artists’ Art Week