| Australian artist Patricia Piccinini creates a world captured in sculpture, video, photographs and drawings. Her incredibly realistic-looking silicone sculptures, in particular, have made her one of the most distinctive artists working today. In these works, strange creatures snarl, stare and even play or sleep peacefully with human children. The viewer, brought into their world, may well feel frightened by these creatures, worrying for the children’s safety. But, at the same time, one might perceive that these strange beings are weak and that they need our mercy. |  |
Patricia Piccinini’s Ambiguous World – Rieko Fujinami
Australian artist Patricia Piccinini creates a world captured in sculpture, video, photographs and drawings. Her incredibly realistic-looking silicone sculptures, in particular, have made her one of the most distinctive artists working today. In these works, strange creatures snarl, stare and even play or sleep peacefully with human children. The viewer, brought into their world, may well feel frightened by these creatures, worrying for the children’s safety. But, at the same time, one might perceive that these strange beings are weak and that they need our mercy.
While they may look ugly or scary to us, the children depicted alongside them seem to be playing peacefully and in harmony with them. The scenes are ultimately depictions of innocence, and Piccinini makes them appear as if there were nothing strange about their playmates at all. That such harmony with the bizarre or the foreign is missing from our society at large should strike the viewer in taking in these works.
In this way, Piccinini very carefully weaves ambiguity into her world, and this ambiguity is meant to put our own values and philosophical foundations into confusion. Although we might believe in the privilege of the human being in the context of earth’s overall hierarchy—that we can take anything from nature, or create something new from it, and then decide its value—while in front of Piccinini’s work, we might feel anxiety about this privilege.
In contrast to these works, Piccinini has spent the past six months working in New York as part of an ISCP studio residence program and, during this time, she has created a new series of drawings. In her current “Hair Nest” series, the artist explores the protective nature of the human head of hair as well as his or her pubic hair as symbols of sexuality and beauty. In these works, the head’s beautiful hair, which is originally meant to protect the brain, mingles with the more hidden pubic hair meant to protect the genitals. Within the context of the images too, we frequently see objects that could be eggs and/or testicles wrapped and protected by the flowing hair. Since all cells at the ends of hair strands are already dead, the paradox of these dead objects protecting such centers of life is very much present here, as is the complicated ambiguity between the birth and death.
One of the drawings, Mother with Hummingbird, features two hummingbirds hovering around a hair nest. One bird flies around the nest, attracted, as if to a flower, or possibly like a male drawn to a female’s pheromones. The other bird, however, has fallen to the ground and lies upside down. This bird seems already to be dead. Here, the nest may well symbolize the passive feminine side of sexuality—unmoving and centered around the protecting and raising of the young, with the living body intimately tied to the continuation of its own DNA. Together, the dead and alive hummingbirds each relate to the process of the male’s brief sex life. During life, the males contribute their half of the DNA from within their mating territory and then die—their primary task completed.
In this way, the hair nest and the hummingbirds add another degree of ambiguity to Piccinini’s story. In the past, the artist’s drawings have been more a part of the creative exploration process on the way to a finished work in another media, such as sculpture, than a finished work themselves. Therefore, we could might expect the appearance of these ideas to appear in three-dimensional space, but apparently the artist stops here, satisfied. And rightly so.
