Between 1980 and 1984 Siopis developed her 'cake' paintings. Using unconventional implements such as piping nozzles and other cake decorating tools to make her high relief impasto paintings Siopis explored the materiality of oil paint, its potential as object and its association with traditional representations of the female body. The excessive impasto surface changes over time with the outside layer of drying long before the interior, leading the surface to wrinkle and crack. This becomes a metaphor for the all too real effects of time and circumstance on the body. Siopis challenges western conventions of the idealisation of female flesh and beauty.Penny Siopis in Gerrit Olivier (ed) Penny Siopis: Time and Again, Wits University Press: Johannesburg, 2014 While the female body is the main focus of these works, their association with food and decay comments on larger social narratives of decay which are developed in the paintings that follow.
