Penny Goring at ICA – Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
Penny Goring’s survey, titled “Penny World,” brings to thoughts phrases the late painter Paula Rego used to explain the lone protagonist of Girdle, 1995: “I considered her as solid out, a sinner within the wilderness . . . An actual, lumpy, bumpy girl who has sinned.” Like Rego’s interpretations of fairy tales—the place the road between innocence and expertise, victims and perpetrators will get difficult—Goring’s biro and coloured felt-tip drawings intermingle intercourse and violence in frank illustrations of alienation, hysteria, deprivation, and mutilation. The exhibition can be populated with lumpy, bumpy girls within the type of dolls—Plague Doll, 2019; Blue Homicide Doll, 2019; Grief Doll, 2019; Poison Doll, 2021; Hell Doll, 2022—stuffed and hand-stitched from silk, velvet, and different material cast-offs, their heads and limbs lacking, contorted, or elongated. Adrift and deserted, the dolls sit on plinths like totems or dangle excessive on the partitions like non secular icons. Their plush, yielding materiality and repurposed home textiles recall works by Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, and Dorothea Tanning, who’ve all represented the physique in items, laden with fetishistic depth.
Elsewhere, a sequence of “anxiousness objects”—delicate sculptures held on ropes and bearing names like Gray Lump, Cry Child, and Purple Torment, all 2017—invite comparisons between creative and therapeutic processes. Right here, the aesthetics of accumulation and compulsion intertwine with an try to resolve psychological trauma. In two video poems, Concern, 2013, and Please Make Me Love You, 2014, she recites wishes, terrors, and rage with a mantralike supply. Goring has additionally put in billboard-sized collages during which her face and physique are pasted over numerous pictures culled from the web. In a single, she seems as Bianca Jagger astride a bug-eyed white horse at Studio 54, hijacking Rose Hartman’s iconic picture of velvet-roped glamour and hedonistic splendor. It’s Penny’s world, in spite of everything. We’re simply residing in it.
— Philomena Epps
