Artist Penny Goring’s Poems of Love and Fear Represent Our Dystopian and Utopian Selves

Words: Sam Moore

The art of Penny Goring feels like it exists as a dispatch from a world not unlike our own. The images feel familiar to us and alien all at once; ‘Dam Gods’ (2015) shows the artist’s downcast face (in a way that feels strangely similar to the Sad Girl meme), over a monochromatic colour field, with the words I AM DAMAGED GODS at the top of the frame in bold, all-caps font. There’s a line break between AM and DAMAGED, turning the work into a visual poem – image and text in conversation with one another. With her forlorn gaze, Goring looks down the way a damaged, disappointed God might do on a creation that has been found wanting. 

In Cold Hunt Corsage, a new retrospective of Goring’s work at London’s Arcadia Missa gallery, the targets of Goring’s disappointment, anger, and surreal dreamlike musings are the banal realities of everyday life. She asks what it might mean to escape from them, and whether another world is even possible. This exhibition takes some of Goring’s work – often made through cheap, readily available means of production like Microsoft Paint – and places it into a new context.

Work that once existed only in digital spaces (Goring was a prolific creator of alt-lit, defined by its emotional sincerity and formal embrace of mixed media and online images, on social media platforms like tumblr), or as posters, are now printed onto aluminium and held up in the dark, heavy frames. There’s a solidity to this, something which seems to ground her more abstract world in a way that draws parallels even closer to our own. ‘For You’ (2024) presents the word WOBBLE across a backdrop of solid, reflective metal; Goring’s word choice seems to aim towards undoing the ways in which we might understand the image itself.

Although Goring has described her own work as dystopian, there remains a defiant streak to it. ‘Plague Fields’ (2024) presents Goring’s face cropped onto a shirtless male body, as it runs, arms outstretched, through green fields that seem almost impossibly bright, almost overwhelming (there’s only a small fragment of clear blue sky in the top left corner of the image). On top of Goring’s head is long black hair, added on in Microsoft Paint, heavily applied to the point where its possible to see your face reflected in it. Next to Goring’s body, in black, are the words, I don’t have a goal, and below, in white, i have an inexplicable yearning.  This image feels typical of Goring; full of dissonance and slipperiness – the name ‘Plague Fields’ at odds with the pastoral beauty of the scene – inviting us to question if Goring’s worlds are places that we might aspire towards or escape to, or prisons of our own making. 

“Aesthetic beauty is something that Goring seems to regard with a cynical eye, an opiate of the masses.”

The dissonance between text and image recurs throughout Cold Hunt Corsage, either to undercut the tone of a piece, or to invite us to consider it in a different way. The text in ‘Plague Fields’ and its refusal to offer a goal offers something deeply earnest in the face of an increasingly goal-oriented society; to yearn, feeling our feelings with the depth that they deserve. 

But then in ‘Ruined’ (2024), there are plumes of smoke, in vivid pastels of pink and purple, so dense that it’s impossible to see what might be lying beyond them; maybe somewhere in that smokescreen is salvation, or understanding. Goring’s text immediately refutes this idea, presenting the words – without a question mark, more like a mantra than a curiosity – HOW MANY TIMES CAN I BE RUINED. 

Aesthetic beauty is something that Goring seems to regard with a cynical eye, an opiate of the masses. In ‘Prayer’ (2024), a digital image of flowers, stunningly bright and unfolding with depth and delicacy, exists in tandem with the word MEDS on the print; as if the flowers themselves, the promise of beauty, might be able to medicate the uncaring brutality of the world as it exists. 

This type of gesture shows the artist at her most surreal, as if the language and images which consider how we live now are unable to capture not just the harsh reality of it, but what an alternative could look like. In one of the artist’s most famous works, ‘Antiraptors’ (2014), a shirtless woman stands with her back to us, red and blue curtains on either side, and the text I DREAM OF ANTI CAPITALIST RAPTORS, as if maybe those raptors that can claw through and tear down the system are just out of sight, looked at by Goring’s subject but not by us. 

There’s something visceral in Goring’s practice; not just in the ideas and imagery that she creates but in the way that the art itself is made. Goring’s superimposing of her own face onto the bodies of others seems to carry with it the stitches of her MS Paint surgery; in ‘Plague Fields’ the space where one face overlaps with another is clearly seen; a sign of the artist’s hand and her desire to intervene into the world. The two faces in Piggy, an image that vibrates somewhere between erotic desire and the threat of violence, exist in stark contrast to the negative of the image that they’ve been superimposed on. 

It’s this act of intervention, of showing the cuts and stitches with which she makes work, and constantly changing the meanings we might take from these images, that defines Cold Hunt Corsage, an emphasis placed on process, a tension between image and word, between the world as it is and might be. 

As Goring tells us in ‘Plague Fields’ this is work that could be defined through an inexplicable yearning. Goring’s art seems to yearn not for something as simple as aesthetic beauty – or a world where beauty in a vacuum can be enough – but for the possibility of a world where terms like this can be redefined; where something new and unseen might be lurking behind a pastel smokescreen, or red, theatrical curtains. Goring always seems to be reaching towards some great perhaps, outstretched hand forced back down by the brutal truth of the world as it is, offering us, instead of some easy alternative, an understanding of how we might be able to craft our own ways out.