GORDON WILDING: THE CIRCUS OF ODDITIES

Freaks ... Oddities ... Sports of Nature ... The human fascination with such things is as ancient as it is now considered disreputable. We’ve supposedly outgrown our need to gape at, ridicule and feel superior to what differs from the norm. But there is another dimension to the compulsion to look at that difference: the need to question those perceived notions of normality. Our attraction/repulsion for what is twisted and deformed is perhaps linked to an uncertainty about just who and what we are.

The art of Gordon Wilding has strong links to the tradition of the sideshow. His images have a flavour of the circus, bright colours evoking a theatrical space in which freaks and mutants, monkeys and elephants cavort. In these images, candy colours clash with disturbing figures – amputees, thalidomide children, flayed animals with their muscles fully revealed as they perform. And yet, when you look past the first shocking impression, many of these figures appear cheerful and even entirely comfortable with their condition, asking us to consider why we might perceive them as horrors.

The theatricality of Wilding’s art echoes the cinematic works of artists like David Lynch and the Brothers Quay in which dark and disturbing subjects are presented to us in vehicles of great formal beauty, causing perceptual disjunctions which demand that we rethink the accepted ways in which we view ourselves and our world. The surprising playfulness of his visual circus belies the depth of the questions Wilding asks.

K. George Godwin