There is a taste for the unpredictable in Penny Siopis's ink and glue paintings, which allows new possibilities to emerge from the artist's plans. A play with images that recalls human experiences of excess, disorder, violence and grief is rendered through a skilful, sensuous and performative use of viscous materials. The works appear elemental and mythological, personal and political at the same time, but they are also constantly uncertain, as if they were on the move. ‘What happens when ink and glue acts on a surface is unpredictable and exciting. This unpredictability creates a certain tension or energy between form and formlessness, balancing them on a knife edge,’ Siopis explains. The border between form and formlessness is uncertain: where anything might emerge, a patient suspension of disbelief is required in order to let images come into being and visibility. Siopis waits for the glue to thicken and the colour to dry and set without intervening in the process of transformation: ‘The knife edge is a precarious condition where a slip and a split can happen,’ she says, referring to her passion for turning points and surprises:

Siopis's interest in the politics of reconciliation in South Africa is mediated and transfigured through a special kind of artistic sensitivity, which enables her not so much to represent, but rather to refigure and reimagine the social, intertwined with the psychical and the personal, and thereby to reveal the potentiality of becoming that she recognizes as a fundamental part of human experience. Her modus operandi translates the ethical into the aesthetic: two differently articulated dimensions that coexist without separation in her art.