What has happened to Penny Siopis, painter of lush excess? Hazel Friedman asked her whether she has `gone conceptual’
REACTIONS to Penny Siopis’ current exhibition range from slight discomfort to outright dismay. Maybe it’s got something to do with the cloying smell of mothballs and cheap perfume wafting from her sarcophagus-like installations; the neatly arranged scent bottles filled with blood; human hair entwined with photographs of her son; not to mention the crude collages that subvert the pristine surroundings in which they are displayed.
What has happened to the girl with the golden brush who used to paint such magnificent portraits of excess? She seems to have turned her earlier works inside out, revealing a tangle of threads hidden beneath their seamless surfaces. They are visceral, emotive, evocative, almost combustible — not unlike Siopis herself.
Interviewing her is a bit like trying to pour a waterfall into a wine glass. She has so much to say, so many sources, ideas and inspirations to articulate: Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger; Jane Campion’s film The Piano; Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror; Franz Fanon; psychoanalytic theories; not to mention a trunkful of personal memoirs. They make fascinating listening but they don’t exactly lend themselves to simple transcription.
“People came here expecting to see beautiful pictures,” she says. “I think they were shocked by the roughness of the show, by my expansion of the media into installation and video, maybe by an element of mystery and ambiguity in the work. Yet there’s a common thread running through it, a continuation of a process that was first articulated in earlier works like Melancholia.”
If there’s a single term that encapsulates Siopis’ concerns, it is dualities: pleasure/pain, desire/fear, self/other, private/public, personal/ political. And in recent years she has explored the ways in which women are represented in history, using issues of race and gender as thematic bookends.
In this exhibition, her focus is more conceptual and contemporary, her personal experiences interwoven with her experience of her son, Alexander, and his place in the world today.
“In a post-apartheid South Africa, I can turn to my own personal history, as well as the political version which I learnt by heart, as did every white child. I’m trying to explore the traumas and pleasures that have informed my life, the power of memory and unconscious desires.”
She adds: “Using pictures of Alexander interwoven with domestic and bodily symbols, I explore the relationship between mother and child, and the curious bond between maid and madam, which often becomes a potent triangle of two mothers and a child. Embedded in this maternal relationship are the contradictions of South African society.”
Siopis also uses bodily symbols to set up a series of correspondences, both conscious and unconscious. Hair, for example, evokes associations of power and sexuality. Shorn hair is associated with different forms of violation. Body fluids such as blood and milk are juxtaposed and interact as symbols of purity and pollution.
Most evocative of all is her use of smell — suffocatingly sweet odours of life, death and decay — which evoke connections and memories embedded deep in the unconscious. No wonder the responses to her show have been extreme.
“I think people have been afraid to project their own interpretations on to the works. They feel out of control when they’re looking at art that is not ordered or contained within neat frames. I’ve turned the gallery into an installation, a space in which you have to trust your own experiences. It can be extremely unsettling,” she says.
Throughout the exhibition, looking devices — binoculars, postbox slits and convex mirrors — are incorporated into her work, both as instruments of access and self-reflection. Is Siopis suggesting that the window to the “other” is in fact a mirror of the self?
“I’m trying to understand the concept of difference, how it is set up at the expense of the other in order to ground the self more solidly. In certain works I draw both on medico-scientific and aesthetic discourse — mediated by actual face masks and drawings of it — to show how representation objectifies difference.
“Borders are set up as systems of control,” she explains. “The breakdown of bodily borders, like physical borders, is a sign of trauma, transgression and, paradoxically, liberation. I want to understand these borders, to get beneath the skin of otherness, to acknowledge and embrace difference.
“I want to locate my own place in the representations that inform my experience.”