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Tender beings.
When Patricia Piccinini talks about her sculptures, her eyes soften, but her body tenses. Like most mothers, she wants to advocate for these children of hers, but she knows they are at the mercy of the world and they have a life of their own. Fresh off a 15-hour flight from her home in Melbourne-accompanied by her biological children, 13-year-old Hector and 11-year-old Roxy-the artist is a quiet island in the hectic atmosphere of the lobby at the Patricia Hotel located on Vancouver's East Hastings Street. Having just taken a walk-through of her exhibition, Piccinini appears placid as she readies herself for the barrage of press and photos that will descend on her while she is in the city to introduce Curious Imaginings, on show as part of the Vancouver Biennale.

A few weeks prior, Peter Hennessey-Piccinini's husband and creative partner, and a sculptor himself-arrived in the city with the artworks. "He showed me what was going on over FaceTime," Piccinini says. Hers is a family practice: Hennessey participates in the creative process, from inception to installation. "Our relationship informs a lot of these works," she says. "We go to bed talking about this stuff, and we wake up talking about it."

Born in Sierra Leone, Piccinini, 52, grew up in Canberra, Australia, where her family moved following a brief stint in Italy after fleeing political unrest in the West African country in the late '60s. Her artistic career began after she earned a degree in economic history from the University of Sydney and subsequently decided to enroll at the Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne. It was during this transition that she met Hennessey, who then went on to pursue a bachelor's of architecture at RMIT University, beginning his own artistic career alongside Piccinini.

A familial theme is present throughout the exhibition. Roxy appears in the show: she was the model for the little girl peering joyfully into the eyes of a sloth-like creature with very long fingernails in The Welcome Guest. Piccinini's love for her work is palpable, even evidenced in the tender title of each piece. The Young Family is a work of meticulously layered and painted silicon and human hair that is painstakingly applied by hand, depicting a transgenic (containing genes from another organism) mother and her little ones: a little bit pig, a little bit human. One of the most notable works is Kindred, an orangutan-ish being holding her two offspring, one more human, the other more primate. All of these creatures have taken up lodging in 18 of the rooms at the Patricia Hotel, some having arrived from Piccinini's latest exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane.

Curious Imaginings is one of the artist's few shows outside the context of a gallery. Setting the show in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside neighbourhood was the brainwave of Marcello Dantas, the curator who brought Piccinini's work to Rio de Janeiro in 2016. "If these sculptures came to life, there is little doubt that they would have a hard time fitting in," says Dantas. "If these creatures were to come [to the city], where would they go? Where would they stay? [The Patricia has become] like a hotel of refugees of another dimension." Indeed, news outlets and viewers routinely use words like "horrendous", "disgusting", and "disturbing" to describe Piccinini's creatures. "I don't want the work to shock. I want to make work that people can connect to," she clarifies. Her art exists to challenge assumptions about what is acceptable and normal, versus what we have learned to perceive as unacceptable and abnormal. "We have a hierarchy in nature-we think that penguins are cute, but walruses are ugly. We're all weird," she says. "This work is actually about boundaries, and when you look at it, you see the collapse of boundaries between species, or between the organic and the artificial."

"This work is actually about boundaries, and when you look at it, you see the collapse of boundaries between species, or between the organic and the artificial."

Each sculpture is crafted at Piccinini's studio in Melbourne by an eight-person team, which includes artists specializing in each step of construction. "If I was the sort of artist who made every bit of this work, I'd only have one work out there," she explains. " Kindred took nine months to make as a team of people." The team members have themselves become family to Piccinini and Hennessey, and it is this collective energy that imbues the body of work with a sense of deep care. "My strength is a kind of creative, imaginative, collaborative sensibility," she says. This team structure also allows Piccinini to explore different mediums for expressing her ideas, which extend to video, drawing, and even the creation of the hot air balloon Skywhale in 2013, commissioned by the city of Canberra.

Walking through Curious Imaginings feels voyeuristic. The figures are so skillfully made, the skin wrinkling at the bend of a wrist, no vein missing. As a viewer, you wait for the sculpture to move. In each room, the scene is so intimate and dynamic that the impulse is to say, "Sorry! Didn't realize you were in here" and close the door. In the nursery where Prone, the bat-nosed baby, is lying in a crib, you feel the urge to speak softly, to coo at the little one. Nature is filled with strange-looking babies, from giraffes that tumble out of their mothers with lanky legs akimbo to puppies that look like hairless rodents. Prone asks if human babies are any less strange than a newborn bat.

"I have been watching people see her work, and something happens inside the viewer, which is a transformation from rejection to acceptance, rejection to empathy," says Dantas. In the case of Piccinini's artworks, their meaning is not in their technical accomplishment or ability to express something about cultural norms-though both of these things are vital aspects of the work-but in the relationship the viewer comes to have with the sculptures. Each creature asks the audience to consider it deeply, to move past initial shock and discomfort and really see the creation. Curious Imaginings requires patience, to spend a minute with your own reactions and assess them. "I think one of the things you might arrive at is the thought, 'How can I continue to believe in these artificial categories when these boundaries have all collapsed?' " says the artist. Piccinini's work is ultimately about vulnerability: the emotional process the sculptures evoke requires the viewer to admit they are uncertain, to let their guard down, and to enter the unknown.

Piccinini sits down next to Kindred and the sculpture takes on new life: both artist and artwork share the same tenderness. The orangutan's brown eyes mirror her creator's, and their hair falls the same way over their cheeks. Piccinini won't touch her own sculptures for fear that it will give others permission to do the same; she knows her creatures' boundaries. In front of the camera, in the small room full of strangers, Piccinini is herself a vulnerable member of the spectacle. Her rescue comes with a shuffling in the hallway. "Are my kids here?" Once again, her eyes soften as Roxy and Hector wander into the room, inattentive to the fanfare that surrounds their mom. Piccinini takes Roxy's face in her hands, and if the moment were to freeze, there would be no way of telling whether the mother and daughter were just another part of the exhibit.

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Tender beings. When Patricia Piccinini talks about her sculptures, her eyes soften, but her body tenses. Like most mothers, she wants to advocate for these children of hers, but she knows they are at the mercy of the world and they have a life of their own.

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Go behind-the-scenes with Patricia Piccinini in her Melbourne studio

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Go behind-the-scenes as Patricia Piccinini discusses her artwork

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The Art Gallery of Western Australia Website

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The Art Gallery of Western Australia is home to the State Art Collection which includes works by Indigenous, Australian and International Artists. The Gallery is open every day except Tuesday, with free admission to most exhibitions.

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Patricia Piccinini - 39 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy

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Find the latest shows, biography, and artworks for sale by Patricia Piccinini. Sierra Leone-born Australian artist Patricia Piccinini is known for her transg...

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short film

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2006, 3:31, stereo, 16:9 directed by Patricia Piccinini animation Dennis Daniel videography Peter Hennessey music Frank Tetaz the girl Laura Mayne

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Patricia Piccinini creation Skywhale delights Melbourne viewers

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Art very occasionally engenders a cult following, but Patricia Piccinini's Skywhale has something akin to art groupies.

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Patricia Piccinini

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Patricia Piccinini was born in Sierra Leone and grew up in Canberra. She received a BFA from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne in 1991. In 1994 she initiated The Basement Project Gallery in Melbourne, which she coordinated until 1996. Her 2003 exhibition We Are Family represented Australia at the 50th Venice Biennale. Piccinini's work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions nationally and internationally including Hold Me Close To Your Heart at Arter Space For Art, Istanbul, Relativity at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, (tiernas) Criaturas / (tender) Creatures at Artium, Vitoria-Gasteiz in Spain and Call of the Wild at the MCA, Sydney. In 2013 she created The Skywhale commission for the Centenary of Canberra and she received the 2014 Melbourne Art Foundation Visual Arts Award. Her solo exhibition LIKE US: Patricia Piccinini is on display at the Newcastle Art Gallery between 29 November 2014 and 22 February 2015.

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Patricia Piccinini was born in Sierra Leone and grew up in Canberra. She received a BFA from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne in 1991. In 1994 she initiated The Basement Project Gallery in Melbourne, which she coordinated until 1996. Her 2003 exhibition We Are Family represented Australia at the 50th Venice Biennale.

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Patricia Piccinini - The artist in her studio

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Interview

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Walking through Patricia Piccinini's Melbourne studio is more like wandering through a cabinet of monstrous curiosities than visiting an artist's workspace.

Observed within: a beast nursing a human child at her breast. Miniature anatomical models. Organic forms mouthing soundless words from the walls. Boxes and boxes of feathers. The severed head of a mannequin child upon a table. An immobile bird of prey made entirely from hair. A baby fused with an egg.

The resemblance of these rooms to a zoology lab or old surgeon's college is unsurprising; Piccinini tells me she taught herself to draw in an anatomy museum. In a space like that, she says, hers was the advantage: "The models always remained still."'

Since then, the multidisciplinary Australian artist has attracted global renown for figurative works that render fantastic, hybrid-human creatures in such anatomic detail that their stillness seems their most unnatural feature. This year, two of Australia's major galleries have announced separate exhibitions of the artist's strange, motionless menageries: Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art are staging the most comprehensive retrospective of her work to date next year; and later this month, Piccinini will have seven works at the National Gallery's Hyper Real exhibition in Canberra.

While her creatures may allude to something orphic and arcane, Piccinini's own framework remains as observational and material as a dissecting room.

"I like 19th century social realism," she says. "[They depicted] how the Industrial Revolution had an effect on the everyday people. I'm interested in the same thing that's happening now, in how technological innovation is changing the way that we see the body."

Piccinini's explorations of biology's potential for change led the New York Times to hail her "sculptures of life forms that don't exist". Over the last few years her unique, three-dimensional monsters made of parts both familiar and strange have made their way into collections across with world, as well as into the Australian popular imagination.

The infamous Skywhale - a titanic, 100-foot-long hot air ball with ten pendulous breasts and a friendly face - first floated over Canberra, commissioned for the city's centenary celebrations in 2013, before travelling as far afield as Japan and Ireland.

Last year, the Transport Accident Commission invited the artist to propose what the human body would have to look like in order to resist a high-impact car crash. The result was "Graham": a thick-necked survivor with a reinforced skull cavity and sacks of air across his chest. Graham made international news.

They are but two amongst Piccinini's many unsettling mutations of human and animal forms. Her Madonnas are not clothed for piety but brazen and naked, half-ape, bristling with hair. Babies in swaddling have adult faces and snouts. Nature's expected laws of delineation - defining scales from skin, bones from feathers, sacs from follicles - are collapsed, all rules rewritten.

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'Nature's expected laws of delineation are collapsed, all rules rewritten': Patricia Piccinini's Newborn (2010) made of silicone, fibre, steel, human hair and possum pelt. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist/NGA

What's uncanny about Piccinini's work is not that an artist's mind can conjure such creatures. It's that the finesse of their detail make every variegated body that she crafts seem suddenly possible.

But for Piccinini, the beasts she invents are the logical conclusion of what is possible within the ongoing material conversation between evolutionary forces and environmental ones. Describing herself as "ambivalent about technology", her relationship to its potential is not so much dystopian as it is technical and explorative.

To create Graham, she worked with a trauma surgeon and a crash investigator. "I really listened and internalised the science of it," she said at the time, "then I approached it in a creative way, on an emotional level."

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Meet Graham: a person designed to survive on our roads. Photograph: Victoria's Transport Accident Commission

Juxtapositions of the scientific against the emotional are perhaps to be expected from an artist whose first university degree was in economics, at the Australian National University. The course offered her understanding of human systems, activity and phenomenons of mass behaviour - although the insight she shares with me was in learning not how the world works, "but how people think the world works". The false perception, the artist declares, is that supply and demand drive productivity; for Piccinini, the motivation for all human productivity is desire.

It's a conclusion expressed with the considered sincerity that defines Piccinini's approach to her own creative process. Discussing the upcoming Hyper Real exhibition - where she will be featured alongside artists including Belinda de Bruyckere and Ron Mueck - Piccinini explains the continuing appeal of realism with articulate care.

"If you're making art that's the opposite of realism - which is a kind of formalism - then it's difficult for everyday person to connect with that, because to understand formalism ... you have to have a knowledge of [it] and a background in it," she explains. "That can be alienating ... whereas realism has the potential to be so inclusive. Anyone can connect to it - because it's what they know."

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'Realism has the potential to be so inclusive': The Young Family (2002). Photograph: Courtesy the artist/GOMA

At Brisbane's QAGOMA, the spectrum of what the artist intends as a "compassionate vision" of the body will be recognised with some scale. The Curious Affection exhibition will fill the gallery's entire ground floor with a decade's worth of Piccinini's most recognisable works, as well as a bespoke large-scale new inflatable sculpture and an immersive multisensory installation.

I have my own experience of aesthetic immersion in Piccinini's studio when she takes me into its "hair room". In it, an assistant is sewing individual hairs into the arms of a fleshy figure frozen in the act of giving birth. Were it not got the gentle, intellectual presence of Piccinini herself, I'd be freaking out and bolting for the door.

But, of course, these are not real pieces of body or dissections of flesh; they're instruments of a discursive project - even if the hair itself is human. As Piccinini reminds me, with some tenderness: "I use realism, but I don't want to represent reality. I want to represent ideas."
* Hyper Real, featuring the work of Patricia Piccinini alongside Ron Mueck, Sam Jinks and Belinda de Bruyckere, opens at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra on 20 October. Patricia Piccinini: Curious Affection opens at Goma, Brisbane on 24 March 2018 Topics

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From Graham to the Skywhale: the unsettling mutations of Patricia Piccinini

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Walking through Patricia Piccinini's Melbourne studio is more like wandering through a cabinet of monstrous curiosities than visiting an artist's workspace. Observed within: a beast nursing a human child at her breast. Miniature anatomical models. Organic forms mouthing soundless words from the walls. Boxes and boxes of feathers.

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Patricia Piccinini’s transgenic creations: what’s their story?

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Patricia Piccinini’s transgenic creations: what’s their story?

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The Australian

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Piccinini + Hennessey: sincerely artificial

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Piccinini + Hennessey: sincerely artificial

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real-time realtimearts realtime arts magazine reeltime australia australian journal criticism online writing art reviews experimental innovative contemporary artists dance theatre performance music video film documentary visual art digital sound sydney melbourne brisbane adelaide hobart perth darwin piccinini + hennessey: sincerely artificial feature interview: patricia piccininni and peter hennessey   daniel palmer

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RealTime Arts - Magazine - issue 43 - Piccinini + Hennessey: sincerely artificial

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RealTime plus OnScreen online and print arts magazine covering innovative practices in media art, digital art, hybrid art, performance, dance, visual art, sound and music, film in Australia and internationally

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Patricia Piccinini - Once Upon A Time...

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Artium, Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo

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Artist with her work

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Her Web page

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The website of contemporary visual artist Patricia Piccinini. It contains information about and images of her sculptures, photographs, videos, drawings and other artworks. Work shown: Unfurled . This website has been produced by the studio of Patricia Piccinni.