Spilt Coffee

Sylvia Siddell (1941-2011) was largely self-trained as an artist. After finishing high school she worked as teacher for 15 years. During this period she took summer schools and night classes with artists like Colin McCahon and Louise Henderson, and painted in her spare time. When Siddell had children, she stopped working as a teacher and started to spend more time as an artist. She began to draw intricate, fantastical domestic scenes, writing in 1984: “I had painted before, but now found the simple materials of pencil and paper easier to cope with. I became a bit obsessed with the medium – seeing how far I could push it.” (Auckland Art Gallery Associates newsletter, July/Sept 1984).

In Siddell’s work the domestic is made wild and unruly. She has written about the shock of being “suddenly treated as a home appliance” after having children and describes using her drawings to express frustrations with housework, and the domestic lives of women. The works in her first exhibition explored the loneliness of a woman with only household appliances for company, while other series’ of works produced in the 1970s and 1980s looked at the death and destruction of living things to make a meal, the anxiety of poor health, and the struggles of a woman waking up to face the day.

Spilt Coffee shows a woman pinned to her bed, surrounded by an overwhelming sea of objects and animals. This is one of a series of larger drawings that Siddell began in the mid-1980s, when her children were a little older and she was able to give more time to her practice. She wrote, of this period: “I have relished working on a grand scale. Beginning each drawing has been like leaping into a swimming pool. With only a few scribbles to guide me I take a deep breath and dive into the centre of a full sheet of clank space where I am free to invent my own world. Over a period of six weeks or more each drawing evolves as the pencil marks struggle to fill the white space, gradually submerging the icebergs of paper in a sea of images and fetishes.” (Art News, October 1985).

Siddell produced another version of this drawing as a lithograph: https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/1142199