Penny Siopis is known for her intense interest in the vicissitudes of desire and materiality engaging estrangement, shame, trauma and vulnerability in different media. Recently, she has worked with a dynamic mix of ink and glue. Using mostly found images, she encourages a ‘figure’ to emerge from a process of chance. For the artist, materiality itself is emphatically as much image and concept as any pictured ‘subject’ might be. Her most recent work shows her constantly pushing figuration to the edge of formlessness in a vital aesthetic of violence and eroticism.

Sister (2009), Family (2009) and Twins (Brothers) (2009) all touch on precarious states of being. Each presents a single or double figure pushed to the edge of non-being. The edge is literally and conceptually crucial in these works. Edges are generated from the play of figure and ground, of surface and air, gravity, and the artist's desire to embrace the energies and resistances of matter on a plane. The edge is never settled, be it of pictured figure or figuration itself.

With edge comes silhouette. In all three works, the image within the silhouette is captive to the distortions of material drag and flow as matter meanders, pools and runs. Liquid ink and glue flows and hardens over the features of the face we might recognize, forming a viscous layer of space in which fragments of image float and fix.

Family and Twins (Brothers) are duets. The merged, congealed, reddened, whitened interior of Family is more traumatic than that of Twins (Brothers). In Family, the figures appear almost as wounds, edging the work into a darker register of beastly beauty. Twins (Brothers) goes in a different direction, that of highly keyed, saturated desire and a certain swirling lightness of being. Here, edges are left over from spills of glue and pigment and the energy of the artist's gesture. All that settles the flaring, swirling substance are the quiet, almost contemplative residues of the faces visible somewhere under the surface.

Sister virtually loses her edges and her silhouette. Here, the pictorial law leaks away as the frozen figure is submerged in the reddened tug of gravity and seeping matter.