When Sylvia Siddell began her career in the 1970s, her art was shaped by the domestic and familiar. She incorporated family life into the process of art- making as a means of balancing her roles as wife and mother with her activity as an artist. Among other women artists of her generation, Siddell elevated the banal and ordinary occurrences of domestic life to an appropriate and challenging subject for art. Her comments on domesticity contained references to her feelings and frustrations about the wider world continued to inform her work three decades on.