Penny Siopis

"As much as Pinky Pinky is a perpetrator of violence, it also seems a victim of, and scapegoat for, violent, uncivil actions – a constructed 'something' to blame for social problems."

"I believe that encounters with lively matter can chasten my fantasies of human mastery, highlight the common materiality of all that is, expose a wider distribution of agency and reshape the self and its interests"

""I was always interested in objects as carriers of meanings beyond themselves, they are physical traces of time, of people's lives and social histories, like an archive, which I use similarly to how I use film...its an ephemeral art really. The objects get taken down and become like paint tubes again"."

""The constant evolution of the installations and the meanings made from them functions as a generative force in Siopis's work. One thing nestled next to another or dropped over another, creating countless relationships. They're endless these bits of relationships between things and objects and spaces"."

"The material process of the paintings is a fluid affair; the glue’s capacity to change its form and colour when it comes into contact with other forces – air, gravity, water, my gestures – imbues it with a presence that holds onto itself as ‘something other’, yet can simultaneously take on the guise of an image."

"With global warming, what do we imagine? Burning? Drowning? Absolute alterity? And what forms – or formlessnesses – do we imagine this through?"

""Penny Siopis is one of the few artists in the world today who can weave a material web of marks, gestures, voices, words, found things and painted surfaces to entangle the brute forces of history with the delicate threads of human vulnerability"."

"From the outset, her attitude to painting has been simultaneously modernist and counter-modernist in its complex irreverence to the purity of both creative act and the physical medium."

"Many of these prosthetics are "traditionally" flesh colour, a kind of dirty pink. There is irony here, as flesh colour is not just a category of colour, but nothing less than a western conceit in which whiteness (pink) becomes the universal colour for flesh"

""Sopis's Will is the ultimate time piece...We are able to glance back on a life-in-formation and recognize the subject as discursively produced, 'as project, something to be built"