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Penny Goring, Emotive Title

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Arcadia Missa is pleased to present ‘Penny Goring, Emotive Title’, an online presentation of works from the Amelia series, a body of works comprised of 42 drawings and 11 paintings made between 2017 and 2018.

The presentation is punctuated by GIFs and image macros produced by Penny Goring between 2012 and 2015, at a time when she worked mainly online and used the Internet as her primary medium and archive.

Merging her unique visual language with her love for words and fonts, these works show how the universe of the Amelia series reverberates throughout her practice, pervading through ages and mediums.

The Amelia series interweaves history, myth, rumour and world news with the experiences of two girls stuck in a dark dead world: Penny and Amelia, an old lover of the artist’s who is now dead. Into the sphere of their regard come severed heads, their own sainted selves, plague flowers, shit-storms, broken horses, curse plants, melting trees and a set of emergency sticks.

For Goring, making means accessing past traumas that become transmuted in part into the drawings and the paintings, turning the artist’s trauma flashbacks into static gilded iconic emblems that repeat and recur in the work.

The Amelia series interweaves history, myth, rumour and world news with the experiences of two girls stuck in a dark dead world: Penny and Amelia, a lover of the artist’s, who is now dead. Into the sphere of their regard come severed heads, their own sainted selves, plague flowers, shit storms, broken horses, curse plants, melting trees and a set of emergency sticks.

For Goring, making means accessing past traumas and tumultuous relationships. These become transmuted in part into the drawings and the paintings, turning the artist’s trauma flashbacks into static iconic emblems that repeat and recur in the work.

Goring began making the *Amelia* series at a time of high anxiety due to structural oppressions caused by Conservative legislation. She found that accessing memories to create sci-fi spaces between autobiography and imagination, unsettling in mood, became a reflection of a contemporary state and not simply a biographical account. The works come to speak of how violence is commonplace, structural, personal – there is no escape – not even in irony.

Emotive Title presents the works on paper alongside the paintings for the first time, providing insight into how the body of works evolved by transiting from one medium to the other.

Starting with the drawings, Goring creates a vibrant body of works, using a vivid colour palette and often offering multiple versions of the same scene. The works’ titles read like verses of a poem, a nod also to the artist’s poetry practice.

The paintings offer a more condensed body of work. The palette is reduced and darker, the compositions flattened through the use of painstakingly precise colour fields. These are paintings that are anti-paintings, as the artist voluntarily erases any potential for gesture and layers from the works. By moving from paper to canvas, Goring seems to solidify her trauma visions in paint, as if to come to terms with them. As she puts it, through making art ‘my memories and emotions are transformed, repackaged and stored on a high shelf. They can’t hurt me anymore.’

AMELIA

as the money is sky you sit stolen weeping liars they are lurid eyes

sleeping face falling scared and stolen and one Amelia the dreadful

might be releasing forest of teardrops you are in for it you are with

big structural emergency sticks in faithless divorced shit storms all

is for austerity nothing never who mourns a landscape your grey

witness liquid velvet is Amelia’s drug death torment in violent

centuries severed bloody puddle crawling in out plumb the deep

distance from desperation danger holding giant fake future flowers

Amelia’s crimes laughing who is blue Amelia’s promises big as theft

is a sky releasing golden cakes sainted chorus emotive epiphany in

plagues of thunder aching words two dead faces boiling its on and

on 21stC are the Amelia years as hell all arms eyes are cursed and

Amelia over and over deep trauma wi-fi weeping being Amelia.

Penny Goring

Penny Goring graduated in 1994 from Kingston School of Art in London with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art (Painting). She lives and works in the UK. Goring makes drawings, paintings, sculptures, videos, and poems that access recurring personal trauma visions, and by layering these with grief, anxiety, imagination and rage, the subsequent invented mythologies become explorations of the contemporary state of emergency – where violence is commonplace, structural, intimate, where loss of freedoms is forgotten or keenly lamented, and there is no rescue or escape.

Her current solo show Escape from Blood Castle at Campoli Presti, is open until 14 July 2020. She has exhibited at, amongst others, the ICA, London (UK), Tate St. Ives (UK), Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (PL), South London Gallery, London (UK), and Arcadia Missa, London (UK).

Penny Goring Emergency sticks, 2018 Acrylic on canvas 58.5 x 84 Unique Enquire

Penny Goring The 12 promises, 2018 Acrylic on canvas 58.5 x 84 cm Unique Enquire

Penny Goring Amelia makes the rain, 2018 Acrylic on canvas 58.5 x 84 cm Unique Enquire

Penny Goring Amelia has no faith in poetry, 2018 Acrylic on canvas 58.5 × 84 cm Unique Enquire

Penny Goring 5 Times divorced, 2016 Acrylic on canvas 58.5 x 84 cm Unique Enquire

Penny Goring Emotive title (Super virilant hyperdeath virus targeted at you know whose), 2017 Felt tip on paper 30 x 42 cm Unique Enquire

Penny Goring The twelve promises do not double happiness, 2017 Felt tip on paper, framed 30 x 42 cm Unique Enquire

Penny Goring Curse flower mountain, 2017 Felt tip on paper, 2017 30 × 42 cm Unique Enquire

Penny Goring Amelia Tries To Be A Flower, 2017 Felt tip on paper, framed 30 × 42 cm Unique Enquire

Penny Goring 6 broken promises, 2017 Felt tip on paper 30 x 42 cm Unique Enquire

Penny Goring Yellow Is The Colour Of Big Sick (Emergency Sticks), 2017 Felt tip on paper, framed 30 x 42 cm Unique Enquire

Penny Goring, Emotive Title

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