Patricia Piccinini

Patricia Piccinini is one of Australia's leading contemporary artists. She was born in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and arrived in Australia in 1972 with her family. She initially studied economic history before enrolling at art school in Melbourne. After studying painting at the Victorian College of the Arts, she rapidly established a reputation for her work dealing with topical social issues, especially those concerned with bio-engineering and human reproduction.

She enjoys exploring what she calls 'the often specious distinctions between the artificial and the natural'. The concepts that underpin modern science, such as genetic engineering and other forms of biotechnology, are of particular interest to her.

Piccinini has embraced a wide array of materials in her work and moves across multiple media forms: these include still, computer generated images, interactive CD-ROMs, immersive video and sculptural installations, and most recently, film. Piccinini often works by commissioning specialist collaborators from various fields of contemporary industrial manufacture. She is well known for her bio-morphic silicon sculptures, minutely detailed visions of imaginary creatures brought into the world through genetic engineering.

Piccinini has an ambivalent attitude towards technology and she uses her artistic practice as a forum for discussion about how technology impacts upon life. She is keenly interested in how contemporary ideas of nature, the natural and the artificial are changing our society. Specific works have addressed concerns about biotechnology, such as gene therapy and ongoing research to map the human genome. Piccinini often creates acutely aesthetic and appealing works as a means of discussing complex ethical issues; she is also fascinated by the mechanisms of consumer culture.

Text by Tracey Lock, Curator of Australian Paintings and Sculpture, 2009

This work is inspired by two events in Piccinini's life. The first is a true story about a female baboon whose baby died and feeling sad and lonely, the baboon took a human baby to care for. Despite the large scale of the figure, she gently holds and feeds a human baby, showing love and tenderness just like humans do. The baby is calm and safe in the arms of Big Mother. This work of art encourages us to be empathetic, and highlights the bonds that unite all living beings, regardless of appearance.

The second came from the difficulties Piccinini had breat-feeding her son Hector. "He really didn't want to suck which made it hard to get the milk going and so my sister suggested I try breast feeding her baby, who was older and more hungry. I tried, and through breast feeding my sisters baby I learned how to feed Hector. It was really interesting how strange and unusual it is for a mother to breast-feed another person's baby. Even stranger perhaps is how much more comfortable we are drinking the breast milk of another animal – say a cow – than another human being."[1]

By experiencing the emotions presented so palpably in Big Mother, we, the human audience, begin to see the boundaries between human and animal disappear. The feelings and instincts of Piccinini's animals, regardless of how they have evolved, are equal to our own. Piccinini thus prompts us to consider the validity of the hierarchy we impose, a hierarchy that continues to privilege human over non-human animals, and domesticated animals (such as pigs and dogs, which she deliberately references in her creatures to remind us of their' artificially' selective breeding) over the transgenic beings and chimera developed in laboratories, Should all animals have the right to equal consideration because, as the ethicist Peter Singer has argued, 'if an animal feels pain, the pain matters as much as it does when a human feels pain - if the pain hurts just as much. Pain is pain, whatever the species of being that experiences it'?

When looking at the work we can imagine different stories: is this mother a specially engineered primate who has been bred to be a wet nurse? Is she some kind of helper, carer or babysitter?

[1] Patricia Piccinini, Big Mother, https://www.patriciapiccinini.net/writing/50, 2005

The lovers cleverly mixes the appearance and features of animal and machine. It combines the shape of the popular Italian motor scooter, the Vespa, and the muscular form of a male deer, a stag. A hybrid form is created. Piccinini has ‘imagined’ two scooters behaving as animals – as stags fighting, perhaps over territory, or females, as animals do in the wild. there is a remarkable sense of movement achieved in the sculpture, with the shiny sinuous bodies seeming to twist and writhe. one stag is clearly dominant, the other appearing almost to cringe in defeat. the defeated stag looks bewildered – look closely at its ‘dial’! The work raises issues about what is natural, and what is mechanical, and about power and hierarchies in groups or communities. Who will survive: the fittest, the strongest, those bred for particular conditions? The work also reflects another of Piccinini’s favourite themes: consumerism. In Italy, Vespas are seen as symbolic of style and class - they are very desirable, even though not always practical.

More works by Patricia Piccinini in the collection