1973 Bride’s Book
Hand bound album of ‘Wedding pictures’ presented with captions.

** with ‘Opening’ catalogue 1973:

When I first met Penny, or rather Penelope Slinger a few ago she was a student at Chelsea School of Art. It is greatly to the credit of those who taught her and in particular the visiting artists that she has developed so rapidly and with such uninhibited originality. She has evolved a style which is highly inventive, making use of a wide range of methods and profiting of the many opportunities that new materials and techniques offer. Even so, technique is always subservient to the end she has in view. It is the visual and poetic content of her work that matters.

Everything is to her both a personal experience and part of the universal life of women, men, beasts, birds, flowers and the earth they grow from. It is the experience of a woman who is sensitive and young in a commonplace, enigmatic and often hostile world. Penelope weaves her mirror image with disconcerting candour.. She sees herself not as Narcissus but as Ophelia. The outrage that life should end in putrification does not trouble her. She becomes buoyant, floating like a garland of spring flowers and fine lace on the surface of a quagmire, knowing as we do that the fruits, chocolates, bread and wine on which we feast are turning willy nilly to filth. This is the drama she records with innocence and a bewitching laugh.

The transmutations woven by Penelope into her web tempt us like St Anthony to doubt the identity of all things. In her fertile imagination the rites of Spring, the marriage of growth and decay produce a continuous metamorphosis confusing, consuming, conspiring to destroy the confines of decency, courting confusion but carrying unbroken the thread of life.

The cake, the wedding gown, the feast are all prepared to greet us. No corner of our bodies may be excluded from the rites of love, life and death. The myths are renewed. Odysseus reclaims triumphantly his fruitful spouse Penelope and the young slinger slays her bourgeois Goliath. A feast for the eyes – food for thought.

Roland Penrose, Introduction to exhibition.