Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, editor of
Penny Siopis awakens dormant images, coaxing forth a reincarnation of materials and matter. In the latter, she sees potential images, especially in her work with ink and glue, alchemically interacting with their strangeness, their plasticity, which offers an alternative vocabulary to formalism. Siopis draws Donna Haraway’s notion of tentacularity, “life lived along lines,” into her art as she thinks through the senses. The artist forges techniques to make theory tangible and emotional, as in her installation Tentacular Time, which emphasizes flexible and anamorphous forms of thought. She conveys the stickiness of her media and uses this to create material appendages that reach out like suckers, affixing themselves to us and transcending the imposed structures and strictures of genre.
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