[2] Her interdisciplinary practice since the national liberation of her country has explored the persistence and fragility of memory, notions of truth and the complex entanglements of personal and collective histories.

Experimenting with a wide range of materials and processes, she reflects on the politics of the body, grief and shame, estrangement, migration and more recently the relationship between the human and the not-human within the context of climate change.

[3] All her explorations assert materiality and process as inseparable from concept, with her characteristic use of contingent and chance-driven methods becoming emblematic of her interest in 'the poetics of vulnerability'.

[4] Griselda Pollock states, "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".

[5] Siopis established herself as one of the most talented and challenging artists in South Africa and beyond,[6] by working across painting, installation and film, bringing together diverse references and materials in ways that disturb disciplinary boundaries and binaries.

Concepts of time run through all her work often manifesting in the actual physical changes of her materials; in her early cake paintings oil paint is made to be unnaturally affected by gravity, age and decay; in her films using archival footage time is marked as much by the effects of age on the celluloid as by the historical period caught in the sweep of the camera; in her accumulations of found objects in her installations, ideas of the heirloom come to the fore with her ongoing conceptual work Will (1997 – ) – in which she bequeaths objects to beneficiaries – being the ultimate time piece only becoming complete on her death;[7] her glue and ink paintings index flux as they record the material transformation that happens when viscous glue matter reacts with pigment, gravity, the artist's bodily gestures, and the drying effects of the air.

Siopis sees her art practice as 'open form', operating as an intimate model in which the physical changes of her materials can be extrapolated into a larger ethics of personal and political transformation.

According to Achille Mbembe this quality marks her interest in process as a perpetual state of becoming and entails "the crafting of an unstable relation between form and formlessness, in the understanding that the process of becoming proceeds in ways that are almost always unpredictable and at times accidental"[8] "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.

It combines symbols of European high culture and references to Africa, all of them piling up as the debris of history within a claustrophobic space that signifies excess, ruin and psychological malaise.

Through the introduction of objects and found images her works challenged the invisible but powerful structures within the ideological systems of apartheid at a time when political tensions in the country were running high.

Located within Freudian theory and Lacan's 'real' , Siopis explores humans' ability to work-through personal feelings that exceed language by projecting things you cannot do in real life, onto and within fiction, myth and fantasy.

It is an allegory of the nation's deepest fears around issues of poverty, xenophobia, race, and crime at a time of radical social transition and uncertainty post-1994.

[17] By inserting references (voice recordings and objects) into the space, the work evoked a dialogue between Freud's ideas and various individual experiences during the proceedings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, binding the traces of human vulnerability and the dramatic effects of sweeping historical narratives.

[16] For the last 15 years Penny Siopis has been extending her interests in materiality, chance and contingency; form and formlessness into experiments with the unorthodox medium of wood glue and ink.

"[22] Siopis writes of wood glue's 'manifest agency' – a substance of change – white, viscous and liquid, transforming into hard, transparent surface.

[26] In the same year the artist worked in residence at the Maitland Institute on a project titled Open Form/Open Studio[27] where she continued her exploration with glue and ink on large-scale canvases and invited members of the public into the space to engage with her process.

[31] The complete film was more recently exhibited alongside her Atlas series of glue, ink and oil paintings on paper in Siopis' 2021 solo show In the Air[32] at Stevenson, Amsterdam which further explored themes of the climate and the Covid-19 pandemic.

[36] As both art and heirloom, Law writes "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''.

In My Lovely Day Siopis cuts sequences from her mom's 8mm home movies that she took of their family life in the 50s and 60s, and the more public events that were caught in the sweep of her camera.

All the videos take a very particular story from South African history that has an elemental quality and speaks beyond its historical circumstances; two of them, Obscure White Messenger (2010) and The Master is Drowning (2012), look at the actual and attempted assassinations of apartheid Prime Minister H.F. Verwoerd.

In Obscure White Messenger she uses a question and answer format, which she drew from the psychiatrist's report of the interview he had with Dimitrio Tsafendas, immediately after the murder.