PATRICIA PICCININI MAKES TENDER ART
SUBJECT
Patricia Piccinini
OCCUPATION
Artist
INTERVIEWER
Nathan Scolaro
PHOTOGRAPHER
Hilary Walker
LOCATION
Melbourne, Australia
DATE
June 2018
ANTIDOTE TO
Separation
UNEXPECTED
Travelling foetus cells
Patricia Piccinini gets a lot of people telling her that the work she makes is confronting and difficult to look at. She’s okay with that. The important thing for her is that the viewer is held through their discomfort—that there’s enough intrigue in the work for them to stay and contemplate what they’re feeling. A lot of this holding power comes from the tenderness and vulnerability which underlies so much of Patricia’s hyper-real sculptures. It’s here, in the sweet spot of “curious affection” (which happened to be the title of her most recent exhibition at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art) where long-held perceptions are challenged and potentially broken down.
Curious Affection was Patricia’s largest solo show in Australia, and her first major retrospective, featuring new commissions and some of her most famous works from her 20-plus years of art making. Immersive and emotive, wondrous and full of life, the exhibition presented a parallel universe which shone a light on—and even celebrated—the beauty of connection and species diversity.
Born in Sierre Leone in the mid-1960s, just as military coups started to set the country on the path to civil war, Patricia had a turbulent upbringing which ultimately led her and her family to Australia. After graduating with an economics degree, she enrolled at the Victorian College of the Arts where she embarked on a practice of photography, painting and sculpture, and began exploring the boundaries of nature and its simulation. Today, she is one of Australia’s most accomplished artists: she represented the country at the 50th Biennale of Venice in 2003, and set a record for the most-attended contemporary art show in the world in 2016 when she exhibited in Sao Paulo to more than 1.4 million visitors.
“Through science we understand that we are connected to every other living organism. Our cells divide the way yeast does. We share DNA—96 percent of our DNA—with other primates.”
At the heart of Patricia’s exploration is a longing to understand the divisions we’ve created between human and other, and how we can connect through all of these superficial layers. I meet her a handful of times, beginning in her Collingwood studio where her design and construction team were busy sewing hair and putting other finishing touches on the silicone-rendered creatures for Curious Affection. As she showed me around, I was moved by the amount of care she brings to the works, and the way she connects with each of them—pointing out nuances in their body language, the ways they invoke creation, and the potential they hold to help each of us become more nurturing and empathetic, particularly in the face of difference.
NATHAN SCOLARO: So I wanted to start just by hearing where you’re at. We’re a few months into your exhibition now, well and truly on the other side of that enormous creation period. How are you feeling?
PATRICIA PICCININI: Well I’m feeling very good about the exhibition. It was eight years in the making.
