SHARON GOODWIN: ESCAPE FROM NEVERLANDS
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Front Gallery

Catalogue text by Mark A Misic

‘The freaks have escaped the asylum…’ Sourced from Coles Funny Picture Books and cold-war era comic strips, Goodwin’s graphic troupe of monsters, mutants and hybrid creatures — elephant man, a mermaid and cat-woman, among others — blurred the boundaries between animal and human, exploring a rich vein in human culture from ancient centaurs and Shelley’s Frankenstein to contemporary anxieties about genetic engineering. In his review of Goodwin’s hauntingly poetic mise-en-scene of suspended figures, Stuart Koop has suggested that Goodwin’s grotesqueries ‘are not just physically strange but socially estranged … what they display … is a degree of freedom from the strictures of debilitating social norms…’