b.1953, Vryburg; works in Cape Town

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 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 tactile transcendence – in the inherited images and historical flotsam, in the residue, with which she works.