Alice Gordon’s My Happy Childhood offers a unique approach to depicting neglect and trauma, turning childhood imagery into a staged, crumbling spectacle. Instead of showing loss through emptiness, nostalgia is overloaded until it fractures, forcing happiness into a fake performance that no longer holds together. Gordon continues to explore human psychology with a distinctive style, unraveling the stories we tell ourselves to preserve an illusion of wholeness.
Expressions hover between blankness and forced joy, smiles stretched onto faces where they don’t belong. Limbs feel like attachments rather than extensions, bodies split, duplicated, missing parts. Childhood is not preserved but worn and disjointed: An artifact reassembled too many times to hold its shape.
The series subverts the visual language of nostalgia, where innocence is staged and fragile memories are less reliable than they seem. Typical of Gordon’s work, the core theme is expressed through a contradictory style here: Childhood trauma, the pain, the scars of trying to be perfect, all told through a palette of pastel softness and cuteness. By turning childhood imagery upside down, Gordon reverses nostalgia’s comforting illusion. Signs of decay replace the expected warmth, joy becomes something frozen—locked in a tableau of happiness that feels more imposed than real.
Gordon sees humanity as a collection of broken dolls—stitched together, scarred, pretending they’ve never been broken, rehearsing happiness as if nothing ever happened.