Notes

Penny Siopis’ Slings and Arrows – the title derives from a soliloquy by Shakespeare’s Hamlet – depicts a hybrid human-deer figure wounded by arrows and with a rope strung around its neck. Her work directly references Frida Kahlo’s 1946 work Wounded Deer in composition. While Kahlo’s deer is a symbol of her personal emotional and physical anguish, Siopis’ draws on the vulnerability of the oft-hunted deer as a representation of the objectification and trauma experienced by abused women – a theme she is well known for exploring. The work formed part of Siopis’ 2007 solo exhibition Lasso, where she employed the contrasting meanings of ‘lasso’ to ‘stimulate the way I try to figure vulnerability both as painful and as a potentially transformative experience’.1 The painting is visually appealing, tinged in the light pinks and reds Siopis uses in her Pinky Pinky series, but, like those works, its underlying message of violence is in stark contrast to this – perhaps reflecting the duality of the female body as a site of pleasure and pain.

1. Stevenson. (2007) Penny Siopis: Lasso, [Online] Available: http://archive.stevenson.info/exhibitions/siopis/index2007.htm. [2018, December].

Provenance

Russell Kaplan Auctioneers, Johannesburg, 15 September 2012, lot 87.

Exhibited

Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, Penny Siopis: Lasso, 20 September to 20 October 2007. Illustrated in colour in the catalogue, unpaginated.