HOW | SHOWING THE MAKING: PENNY SIOPIS

Penny Siopis enters the space and gathers her materials: Cold glue, inks and dyes, a bucket partially filled with water. She empties a bottle of the cold glue into a separate container, collects the bucket and mixes in the dyes. The room is still. Siopis picks up the bucket and approaches a large-scale canvas at the centre of the space. She considers the canvas for a while before, in a short, sharp gesture, throwing the contents of the bucket up into the air. Splash. A blood-red bloom spreads and settles on the canvas. Then the cold glue, poured out in slow, syrupy lines onto the emergent image.

On Friday 27 September, interdisciplinary South African artist Penny Siopis performed HOW | Showing the Making.

By inviting the audience into her studio process, which encompasses filmmaking, painting, and installation, Siopis’ HOW | Showing the Making is an opportunity for audiences to witness how she makes her work, giving insight into the thinking, inspiration and techniques that shape it.

Specifically, it is the link between Siopis’ painting and filmmaking practices and her engagement with both materiality and physicality in her work, that inform this HOW.

The figure, the ground, and the dreamscape

“The figure is part of the ground, the ground is part of the figure – you can’t have one without the other – and this is the first point of relationality any artist engages with when they have a piece of paper, a canvas or whatever the field is.” – Penny Siopis

This relationality, this relationship between canvas and artist, figure and ground, is a useful point of entry to Siopis’ practice. For Siopis, the activity of painting, drawing and mark-making, is an embodied process that takes place with, alongside, and above the canvas.

Citing horizontality as a working domain, Siopis explains how her engagement with the canvas opens up a space for fluidity, imagination, and dreaming. This dreamscape is an essential part of her process. It is here, lifting, kneeling and pressing into the canvas, where Siopis converses with her work, conceptually and physically – her relationship to the canvas, the ground, the material.

Materiality and memory

The figures, forms and general compositions in Siopis’ work are ever-emergent, always being formed in the way of intuitive mark-making and fugitive materiality. Here, Siopis’ choice of, and engagement with, materials is essential. While the use of ink lends an incidental nature to the work, it is also highly receptive to the body. Siopis’ use of touch, pressure, movement, and her physical manipulation of the canvas all influence the flow and shape these marks adopt and pursue, without directly controlling them. In this way, the mark is a co-authored one, a collaborative engagement between body and material.

Similarly, Siopis’ use of cold glue has, over the years, come to serve as a kind of second skin for the work, pooling and drying to form, at times impasto coagulations, other times paper thin protective layers.

All of this, explains Siopis, has a relationship with the body, of course, but also with memory. Memory, like mark-making, is fugitive and furtive, always in the process of being reconfigured and re-presented. In this way, there is a fine, conceptual tension running through all of her works – that of the pressure between materiality and representation.

Following Siopis’ live-painting demonstration and lecture, as well as the screening of some of her filmic work, the floor opens to questions from the audience, eliciting further reflections from the artist on her practice.

— David Mann

CREDITS:

ARTIST | Penny Siopis
MOMENTEUR FOR THE SO ACADEMY | Athena Mazarakis