Penny Siopis started producing her now famous ‘Cake’ paintings in the early 1980s during her tenure as lecturer at the Technikon Natal (now the Durban University of Technology). It was a time when female artists were rare and Siopis pioneered new ways of thinking about oil paint, stressing its corporeal qualities.

Her choice of cakes stemmed from her interest in their role as markers of the passage of time in social rituals, and in the way, they are often stereotypically associated with women. Siopis found expression through a particular application of oil paint using culinary icing tools mixed with palette knife technique and by incorporating cake decorations into the physical body of impasto paint[1].