Penny (Penelope) Siopis, Pine
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Exhibited : Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, Penny Siopis: Paintings, 16 April - 30 May 2009
Literature : Sophie Perryer (ed.) (2009) Penny Siopis: Paintings, Cape Town: Michael Stevenson. Pages 46-49, illustrated twice in colour; page 2, installation view in colour.Pages 8 and 9: ON A KNIFE EDGE: Penny Siopis in conversation with Sarah Nuttall:Pine, the earliest work on exhibition, was surely painted in Greece. The embrace of the couple is not entirely a gentle one, is it? Yes, it was painted in Greece, and for me is a transitional work. At the time I was thinking about the expressive possibilities of the visual field in painting, how repetition of shapes and physicality of surface could trigger emotion. I began by dropping ink and glue randomly onto the surface. The resulting forms brought an image of a forest to mind. This might have been because I was living in a building swathed in a thicket of pine trees. Greece is the only place I have been where pine trees grow so near to the sea! But I was also reading about the Greek civil war and how forests were places of both terror and refuge at the time. I then looked for a visual reference of the civil war and came upon a photograph of two comrades-in-arms. The couple reminded me of an old photo of my father and mother. I made a clearing in the forest, so to speak, and positioned them as if spot-lit in that clearing. Yes, they are locked in an ambiguous embrace; aggression or love? I then dripped hot coloured ink from the top of the canvas. The drips ran around the raised dollops of glue simulating pine cones and needles, animating and binding the surface and the whole visual field like a kind of camouflage.Gerrit Olivier (ed,) (2014) Penny Siopis: Time and Again, Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Page 217, illustrated in colour.
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