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
1 - Becoming Alive Again
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
In 2012, Penny Siopis began what was to become a three-part work, a piece which remains unfinished as I write this in May 2014. After the initial splash of paint, the project seemed to lead nowhere. She jettisoned it. In that same year, her husband Colin Richards died. The devastation and stupor she experienced left her with no room to think creatively. Drenched with pain and grief, she found no interest in the world any more. Making things and painting pain might have been one way for her to commune with him. But how could she make art again without being mechanistic? And yet, what would it mean to never again make something, when her entire life had been lived through making things?
To the Studio
During those long months of reclusion, Siopis would buy newspapers from a man who sold them on the street by the traffic light. It turned into a ritual. Soon, apart from the company of a few friends, newspapers became her main point of contact with the world. In return, the world as it is made in the newspapers came into her last intimate space, her home. She would read them for their content in the form of news. But they were also a unique space she could inhabit. Unlike the immaterial and numinous space of the screen, they were tangible, made up of lines, headings, colours, stories, images. Each showed something of the world outside her home.
After some time had passed, she returned to the studio. Time in the studio was not the equivalent of a full return to life. Instead, it became bracketed time. Studio time was safe time. In the studio, she did not need to engage with the actual work of living. Or if she did, it was mostly in the form of thoughts. This is when she started working with cut-outs, with lines, words, all affixed to surfaces with visceral splashes. Gradually, texts or lines, most often scrambled and stretched, took the shape of concentric forms. They could still be read. But reading them required specific bodily movements.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Penny SiopisTime and Again, pp. 37 - 42Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2014