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.