Patricia Piccinini: Exhibition of human-beast sculptures from artist evokes disgust and emotion
Patricia Piccinini's works are designed to be at once repulsive and endearing. The artist intends many of her works to cause reflection on how we as humans use animals to benefit our lives, and the responsibility we have to them.
MABEL LUI: At first glance, Patricia Piccinini’s hyperrealistic sculptures come across as creepy, unsettling and even repulsive. But look intently, and you will soon find yourself won over by the palpable tenderness of these anthropomorphic creatures.
“Hope”, at Tai Kwun, is Piccinini’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong. The artist, who represented Australia at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, is showing over 50 works, including her signature lifelike sculptures and a range of video works, paintings and drawings. Piccinini’s works are centred on the concept of “artificial nature”, which deals with issues such as genetic modification, climate change and extinction…
The artist, who has come to Hong Kong to install the exhibition, says she has been thinking about technology and the body since she was a young child, when she watched her mother suffer through years of liver cancer. “I was really interested in medical innovation as I wanted her to be saved by medicine. In the end, she wasn’t, but I would have liked that to happen,” Piccinini says.
“Almost 40 years ago, if somebody had said to us, ‘Oh, we can save your mum, we can give her a new liver, but it has to come from this pig,’ we’d be going, ‘Great!’ We wouldn’t care if it was unnatural, if it was artificial – we just wanted her to live”… But as Piccinini grew older, she also began thinking about ethics and the responsibility that humans have to other species.
“When we use other non-human animals to make our lives better, what is our duty of care to the creatures that help us?” she asks. “What does it mean to have blended bodies? And how does that change the way we see other animals and understand them?…I recognise that there’s a lot of different levels to this area, that it is not black and white. And that is why there is a lot of ambiguity in my work”…
That ambiguity comes through even though the viewer’s initial reaction is likely to be repulsion: her uncanny sculptures touch on unsettling issues such as tissue engineering, xenotransplantation (the transplantation of living cells and tissues from one species to another) and cloning.
The Bond (2016), for example, features a mother cradling a baby with characteristics of multiple animals, including humans, pigs, dogs and armadillos. The baby’s back even resembles an inanimate object: the sole of a running shoe, something that challenges our perceptions of what is considered natural and organic.
“A lot of people will look at that baby and go, ‘Gross, oh my God, I wouldn’t want to give birth to a baby like that,'” Piccinini says. But to endear viewers to it, the artist has chosen to depict a mother-child bond that audiences may be able to connect with… The idea of having technology that can be beyond our control – I think it’s very frightening,” she says. SOURCE…
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