page_title: Penny Siopis
section_title: Work
hierarchical_section_title: Penny Siopis / Work
caption_attribution_description: English: Installation by Penny Siopis, Wits Art Museum, 2015
context_page_description: Penny Siopis is a South African artist from Cape Town. She was born in Vryburg in the Northern Cape from Greek parents who had moved after inheriting a bakery from Siopis maternal grandfather. Siopis studied Fine Arts at Rhodes University in Makhanda, completing her master's degree in 1976, after which she pursued postgraduate studies at Portsmouth Polytechnic in the United Kingdom. She taught Fine Arts at the Technikon Natal in Durban from 1980 to 1983. In 1984 she took up a lectureship at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. During this time she was also visiting research fellow at the University of Leeds and visiting Professor in Fine Arts at Umeå University in Sweden as part of an interinstitutional exchange. With an Honorary Doctorate from Rhodes University, Makhanda - Siopis is currently Honorary Professor at Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town.
context_section_description: Siopis established herself as one of the most talented and challenging artists in South Africa and beyond,   by working across painting, installation and film, bringing together diverse references and materials in ways that disturb disciplinary boundaries and binaries.
  
  Concepts of time run through all her work often manifesting in the actual physical changes of her materials; in her early cake paintings oil paint is made to be unnaturally affected by gravity, age and decay; in her films using archival footage time is marked as much by the effects of age on the celluloid as by the historical period caught in the sweep of the camera; in her accumulations of found objects in her installations, ideas of the heirloom come to the fore with her ongoing conceptual work Will (1997 - ) - in which she bequeaths objects to beneficiaries - being the ultimate time piece only becoming complete on her death; her glue and ink paintings index flux as they record the material transformation that happens when viscous glue matter reacts with pigment, gravity, the artist's bodily gestures, and the drying effects of the air.
  Siopis sees her art practice as ‘open form’, operating as an intimate model in which the physical changes of her materials can be extrapolated into a larger ethics of personal and political transformation.  According to Achille Mbembe this quality marks her interest in process as a perpetual state of becoming and entails "the crafting of an unstable relation between form and formlessness, in the understanding that the process of becoming proceeds in ways that are almost always unpredictable and at times accidental”
caption: Charmed Lives installation by Penny Siopis, Wits Art Museum, 2015
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