Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Frontispiece
- Introduction
- 1 Becoming Alive Again
- i Beginnings: Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
- ii Cake Paintings, History Paintings: Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
- 2 Historical Delicacies
- iii Installation and Collection: Penny Siopis in Conversation With Gerrit Olivier
- 3 The Artist's Will
- iv Figuring the Unspeakable: Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
- 4 Remembering Three Essays on Shame, Penny Siopis, Freud Museum, London 2005
- 5 The Vitality of Matter: Notes on First Form, Surfaces, Intimacy and the Social
- v Video Stories: Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
- 6 Penny Siopis's Film Fables
- 7 Love and Politics: Sister Aidan Quinlan and the Future We Have Desired
- 8 A Retrospect
- vi Painting on the Edge of Formlessness: Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
- 9 An Artist's Dance through Medium and Vision
- 10 Penny Siopis: Desire and Disaster in Painting
- vii Time Again: Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
- Appendix
- References
- Index of Illustrated Works
- Artist Biography
- Exhibitions
- Selected Bibliography
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
9 - An Artist's Dance through Medium and Vision
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2019
- Frontmatter
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Frontispiece
- Introduction
- 1 Becoming Alive Again
- i Beginnings: Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
- ii Cake Paintings, History Paintings: Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
- 2 Historical Delicacies
- iii Installation and Collection: Penny Siopis in Conversation With Gerrit Olivier
- 3 The Artist's Will
- iv Figuring the Unspeakable: Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
- 4 Remembering Three Essays on Shame, Penny Siopis, Freud Museum, London 2005
- 5 The Vitality of Matter: Notes on First Form, Surfaces, Intimacy and the Social
- v Video Stories: Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
- 6 Penny Siopis's Film Fables
- 7 Love and Politics: Sister Aidan Quinlan and the Future We Have Desired
- 8 A Retrospect
- vi Painting on the Edge of Formlessness: Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
- 9 An Artist's Dance through Medium and Vision
- 10 Penny Siopis: Desire and Disaster in Painting
- vii Time Again: Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
- Appendix
- References
- Index of Illustrated Works
- Artist Biography
- Exhibitions
- Selected Bibliography
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
Summary
There is a taste for the unpredictable in Penny Siopis's ink and glue paintings, which allows new possibilities to emerge from the artist's plans. A play with images that recalls human experiences of excess, disorder, violence and grief is rendered through a skilful, sensuous and performative use of viscous materials. The works appear elemental and mythological, personal and political at the same time, but they are also constantly uncertain, as if they were on the move. ‘What happens when ink and glue acts on a surface is unpredictable and exciting. This unpredictability creates a certain tension or energy between form and formlessness, balancing them on a knife edge,’ Siopis explains. The border between form and formlessness is uncertain: where anything might emerge, a patient suspension of disbelief is required in order to let images come into being and visibility. Siopis waits for the glue to thicken and the colour to dry and set without intervening in the process of transformation: ‘The knife edge is a precarious condition where a slip and a split can happen,’ she says, referring to her passion for turning points and surprises:
The times seem to have made me hypersensitive to all sorts of imagery, especially that which marks ambivalence and the imponderable. In South Africa now we are confronted with the estrangement and dislocation that come with deep uncertainty about the stability of what we might call the social contract. At the same time, this instability might be an occasion for exhilarating change. It's a time of flux, a time which can congeal into sheer horror or open up to sheer ecstasy.
Siopis's interest in the politics of reconciliation in South Africa is mediated and transfigured through a special kind of artistic sensitivity, which enables her not so much to represent, but rather to refigure and reimagine the social, intertwined with the psychical and the personal, and thereby to reveal the potentiality of becoming that she recognizes as a fundamental part of human experience. Her modus operandi translates the ethical into the aesthetic: two differently articulated dimensions that coexist without separation in her art.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Penny SiopisTime and Again, pp. 277 - 284Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2014