escape from neverlands
The freaks have escaped from the asylum, we see them here limping, staggering, fleeing as best they can from an institution high on the hill in the distance, armed guards in pursuit. There is an odd assortment of hybrids and mutants-a man with the head of an elephant, two women, one with the head and tail of a cat, the other a mermaid, two headless dogs joined together-all bad experiments in radical surgery to combine one human or animal with another. Indeed, all of them still bear bleeding scars from this improbable suturing.
In Neverlands the grotesque end of book illustration is excerpted and re-presented in stark relief as a standing dramatic tableau in the gallery. Sharon Goodwin's style varies depending on her sources, which might range from Coles Funny Picture Book to postwar US comics. The cutout comic-figures are doubly strange in these new environs; freaks in their own fictitious worlds but also weirdly brought from a page to life-size in the gallery. In every case, the stitches are red, fresh and vivid next to the black and white line drawing.
The trope here, the suture, is the pictorial cue to the appropriation of one found image or another, the visual 'switch' that enables disparate things to easily combine under the pleasing sign of antique or kitsch horror. And there is obvious nostalgia for the sense of possibility embodied in these retro-mutants, and also for the corporeal means of transformation.
To be precise, things used to combine more easily, believably. Perhaps they still do in kid's culture, to wit, teenage mutant ninja turtles or Transformers. Indeed, mutantcy seems a very dated, naïve form of aberrancy now, which did not