b.1953, Vryburg

In describing Penny Siopis’ practice, a necessary caveat: it is too slippery in form, too wide-ranging in ambition, to be distilled to pithy statement. Hers is an “aesthetic of accumulation,” a logic of excess, a hoarding of signs. Edges, boundary lines, beginnings and endings, states of change – these are among the subjects that inform her enquiries. As to a single preoccupation, the artist offers residue. A ‘historical materialist’, Siopis looks to the traces of past action, asks after the material vibrancy of artefacts made and found; what they might recall of their provenance. She moves between modes with limber agility, playing the roles of both artist and archivist. While predominantly a painter, Siopis’ practice extends to include found film and objects in a sustained meditation on trauma as it appears, the artist writes, “in material amalgam.” From her early ‘history’ paintings to Will, a growing collection of objects and their anecdotes to be bequeathed to friends and family at the artist’s death, loss (past, forthcoming) is a constant undertone. Pursuing a “poetics of vulnerability”, Siopis transcribes, however obliquely, shared and individual griefs – punctuated by small moments of material transcendence – in the inherited images and historical flotsam, in the residue, with which she works.