The future is now. Or at least that appears to be the case with Patricia Piccinini’s vividly real yet fantastically surreal sculptures, which will be appearing at the Art Gallery of WA (AGWA) this May.
Her work elicits equal parts fascination and horror in her viewers, mainly because the creatures she creates exist on the edge of dreams. Mythic and sublimely magical in nature, her beings appear as though they could reside in this realm if only genetics would take such leaps.
‘I think the creatures that exist in nature are much more extreme and unfathomable than the ones I create,’ confided Piccinini on the phone from her home in Melbourne.
‘Basically, at the core of my work lie questions about our definitions of what we consider natural and what we consider artificial. Today it’s really hard to tell what’s natural and what’s artificial. Perhaps it doesn’t matter to us and the distinction is becoming increasingly irrelevant’
The result is a menagerie of what at first glance appear to be monsters, but quickly reveal themselves to be creatures capable of love and compassion just like ourselves, if not more so. They evoke a sense of possibly the purest form of love in the universe: unconditional love.
In one piece, a large pink mermaid-like creature lies on a bench, it’s head resting in the lap of a young boy, both of them napping, both of them content. Elsewhere and a long limbed humanoid mother carries her offspring coddled to her chest, while another piece depicts a small forehead-wrinkled humanoid baby being held aloft by a human hand.
‘I hope the work has integrity and is seen as quite sanguine and hopeful. It’s not nihilistic. It’s not talking about technology taking over and how we’re all doomed. I really believe in technology, I use it and I want it to work, but I’m interested in how that changes what it means to be human. I think this is an important question of this time we live in.
‘I don’t like shocking people,’ Piccinini clarified, her voice as delicate and loving as the creatures she imagines. ‘It doesn’t work. I don’t like grossing people out, I could make violent looking works full of blood and so on, but I like creating work that draws people in by engaging their sense of empathy.
‘I don’t want to scare people. I want to bring the viewer in, invite them into my world. I don’t want people to think my work is a freak show.’
In fact, it’ll be an art show, especially when Relativity opens at AGWA in May. Initially the exhibition was going to be a collection of the artists work from the past 20 years. An almost mini-retrospective. But Piccinini wanted more, and decided to create a site specific work for the show in the gallery’s main atrium where the spiral staircase is.
‘I’ve made a new work called Aloft . It’s a giant, hanging egg sac made of human hair felt. It’s bursting with life; with eggs. It makes a beautiful image as you walk into the gallery. It’s also quite incongruous with the atrium which makes a strong architectural statement.
‘Aloft is about growth, about organic growth. It’s about life. And so there’s a beautiful tension in that it doesn’t really fit in with the gallery, it doesn’t belong and so it asks the question “where does new nature belong?â€.’
The sac itself contains a young boy, peeping out, with a cheeky look on his face. However, the full extent of the work isn’t realised until you travel up the stairs to look at other exhibitions in AGWA.
‘It’s not until you virtually leave my show and go upstairs to the first floor where there are other exhibitions that you can see inside the egg sac. The boy is surrounded by these sort of larvae, maggoty type, luminescent forms. And they’re really quite big, about a meter long.
‘They’re conceivable, they’re real-looking and even familiar but we don’t know them. We’ve never seen them before but we can imagine they have come from the same genetic material that we’ve all come from. They look very natural.’
And like all of Piccinini’s work, it will beguile, intrigue and simply draw you in. After all, in an age where the superficiality of the human condition is laid bare at approximately 30, 500 tweets a minute, the inexplicable becomes more magnetic than ever before.
Patricia Piccinini’s Relativity opens from Saturday May 1 until Sunday August 22 at the Art Gallery of WA. www.artgallery.wa.gov.au
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
