Brought up in a rough area, Goring drank heavily and never thought that she would make it as an artist. Finally, after a detour into ‘weird Facebook’, her freaky explorations of womanhood are getting their due
The floor beneath Penny Goring’s worktable is awash in filaments and fragments of scarlet cloth. Slivers and snippets carry across the carpet in crimson eddies, as though blood had spilled from her stabbing scissors and is seeping across the floor of her bedroom into the world beyond.
Encountering her art – haunting doll-like soft sculptures; paintings lifted from a brutal dreamworld – it is easy to confect an image of Goring as some otherworldly creature plucked from a fairytale. We meet on a wet day in late spring, not at a haunted forest but the very real-worldy locale of Surbiton station. Walking through the rain as buses splatter past, we talk about not being able to wear high heels anymore, and her time as an art student in London in the early 1990s.
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