Description
This limited offer consists of Penny Siopis’s Shame: Pools & Tracey Rose’s Half A. Both of these prints centre around an engagement with the psychological consequences of internalised and repressed emotions, with a view towards healing and transcendence. Through the evocative, visceral, and intentionally sporadic nature of the mark making, these works examine the relationship between childhood experiences and traumas, and how these manifest during adulthood. Furthermore, both incorporate unusual paper sizes and additional elements which add to their formal tension.
Penny Siopis’s ‘Shame: Pools’ explores the difficulties of finding a visual vocabulary to represent the psychological experience of shame, and how this state informs one’s sense of self and perceived relationship to others. Tracey Rose describes ‘Half A’ as “a journey into paranoia”. The work channels the unabashed acerbity of Rose’s iconic performances such as ‘Lucie’s Fur: The Prelude’ through a palimpsest of religious imagery, outlandish props (the cannons and pompoms) and a striking clash of erasure and formlessness.
Penny Siopis, Shame: Pools
Three-plate colour etching, with collaged plastic found objects and hand stamping
Paper: 87 x 39.5 cm
Edition of 60
Penny Siopis (b. 1953) is based in Cape Town, South Africa.
This is a rare and significant print from one of the country’s top artists.
“In this series, I reflect on the public and psychological state of shame in our current times. However powerfully shame is recognized as part of our human condition it is difficult to represent. Like love, which may be shame’s antidote, it is often only manifest in clichéd and mannered forms. Shame: pools deliberately uses such forms and awkward child-like references to mark shame as a primary psychological state of self-exposure a child experiences and to which the adult self returns.”
– Penny Siopis
Tracey Rose, Half A
Pigment inks on Hahnemühle etching paper 310gsm
55 x 37.5 cm
Edition of 60
Tracey Rose (b. 1974) is based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Showing the mark of the hand, this print with its series of small drawings is described by Tracey as ‘a journey into paranoia’. Half A was digitally printed on white Hahnemühle etching paper, and lasercut by Lightworks, Johannesburg under the supervision of Andrew Meintjes.
