In his seminal essay, The Gift, French sociologist Marcel Mauss describes the gift as a ‘complete social fact’, pervading all aspects of life and capable of revealing the complex contractual obligations that bind people to one another and to society. The gift seeks to establish and maintain a relationship between individuals across generational time and space, drawing them into an alliance in which the true value of the thing given is measured by the strength of the bond created. There is power in giving, which shifts asymmetrically between giver and receiver at the moment in which the investment becomes a return. But to offer immediate reciprocation is to render the gift meaningless. Time must lapse, allowing for a momentary forgetting of the debt that receipt necessitates.

Penny Siopis has long understood the power of the gift to reveal and maintain complex social relationships, recognizing that not even death releases the stakeholders from their mutual obligations. Bequeathed at the moment of the benefactor's death, the gift becomes heirloom, the receiver becomes heir. Here, the bonds that tie us to one another in life are maintained after death through material reminders, the life of the thing inherited fetishizing the life of its (original) possessor. For the beneficiary, the heirloom makes a presence of an absence. For the benefactor, the return of the heirloom is the promise, however illusory, of continuance, ultimately extending biographical life beyond biological death. The gift for both is memory.

Since 1997, Siopis has been preparing her will, actively cataloguing and documenting her extensive collection of objects and artworks into both a legal document and a dynamic artwork-in-progress that chronicles her life's milestones and relationships. From the beginning, the artist accepted that this process started long before her own biography was set in motion, and revelled in the knowledge that the social lives of the things in her collection would continue after her.