EXHIBITIONS:
Double Knowledge
Penny Goring (b. 1962) lives and works in London. Goring studied her BA in Fine Art (Painting), at Kingston University, Kingston, UK (1994) and Fashion Writing, London College of Fashion, London, UK (1981).
In Goring’s own words, “it is easier to communicate emotions by inventing shapes that show how it feels”. From the tender to violent, impassioned to irreverent, stitched into the artist’s soft sculptures and sketched out in biro are the artist’s lived experiences of trauma, bereavement, and personal struggles with physical and mental health. Goring’s material vessels used to exorcise, confront and process far reaching and often contradictory feelings of fear and fury, love and loss, hope and despair, become overflow receptacles for what can no longer be contained within the artist’s own body. A practice born of readily available, inexpensive materials is itself the result of harsh economic realities – the personal intermingling powerfully with the political.
In 2022 Goring was the subject of a major solo exhibition, Penny World, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, UK. Further solo/ duo exhibitions include: ‘Princess Star Star and the Constant Mourners’, Kapp Kapp, Philadelphia, US (2021), ‘No Escape from Blood Castle’, Arcadia Missa, London (2021), ‘Those Who Live Without Torment’, Galleria Federico Vavassori, Milan (2021), ‘Escape from Blood Castlel’, Campoli Presti, Paris, France (2020), ‘Safe Words’, Elene Abashidze Project Space, Tbilisi, GE (2019), ‘Damaged Godsr’, Arcadia Missa, London (2016). Her Work is included in prestigious public collections including those of the Art Institute of Chicago (US) and FRAC des Pays de la Loire (France).
