Place publication: Johannesburg Publisher: The artist Exhibition 2017
Reference note: Preoccupied with the crisis of climate change, Penn's work sees the image of the cloud act as a reoccurring reference to climate change debates as well as a symbol for an uncertainty and unease that is both global and personal. Influenced by Romanticism, her meditative renderings of the cloud across media also explore the opposing feelings of intense anxiety and acute wonder that characterise the Sublime.
Something interesting happens to our experience of time when we look at the sky or at the ocean. At a glance they are static and unchanging but after an interval they are transformed entirely. It is this interval that is one of the main foci of Penn's work that she explores through repainting the same cloud in similar as well as different scales and techniques. But it is also a period that is elusive and resists pinning down. Through re-painting and repetition, the interval in Penn's work starts to describe the kind of minute and slow changes in nature that hold us in rapt astonishment when speeded up in a time lapse sequence. Such a focus on these tiny increments of transformation can be seen as a rejection of the narrative of the transformation (this changes into that) in favour of the process of alteration itself. In our own every day experience of time, cloud and sea change slowly but instead of speeding up time to make the changes clearer as in a time lapse movie, Penn calls a halt and situates herself in the space between transformations. In this liminal space the addition of only slightly differing images has the opposite effect and works to expand and slow down time.
To paint an echo, to freeze the seas and to slow the clouds, Penn's work can equally be seen as an attempt to hold back chaos and entropy as the careful study and immersion in the natural processes of transformation and dissolution.
A single highveld cumulonimbus cloud painted in white gouache on each page of a 15 page black accordion fold moleskine book, displayed on a wall-shelf with Perspex cover
Exhibition notes: ‘Booknesses: Contemporary South African Artist's Books’.