Humans are a distinctly contrary species. The more we talk of inclusiveness, the more those seen as other are vilified. The more we concern ourselves with preserving our unspoilt wildernesses, the more there is an urge to jet off to see such places.
Australian artist Patricia Piccinini has created a wilderness of her own for the Galway International Arts Festival at the Galway Festival Gallery, and populated it with creatures that appear, on first glance, to embody everything that is other. They are also strangely familiar as she imbues her sculptures with such a vulnerable intimacy that you can find yourself experiencing unusual impulses: such as wanting to cuddle and cherish Clutch, a de-feathered but variously hairy pelican that is nurturing her own babies, while also morphing into the rubber sole of a boot.
In earlier exhibitions, her sculptures appeared on plinths, on benches and in film. More recently, Piccinini has been constructing display habitats or, as she calls them, dioramas. The word brings to mind those natural history exhibits popular during the Victorian era, an era that also saw the popularity of the human zoo with all its own disturbing connotations. For Galway, the artifice of the setting is deliberate and it has the effect both of making the sculptured creatures even more hyperreal, and hinting at a future where we will only be able to discover approximations of nature in manufactured settings: think Joni Mitchell’s Tree Museum in Big Yellow Taxi. Think also of how animals may have mutated by then, simply to survive; and with that in mind, wonder about how much we may need to mutate ourselves.
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The individual pieces that are taking up residence in the Galway diorama have been made over the past few years and, describing them, Piccinini demonstrates an intimate knowledge of the wonders of nature, and a searing wonder at what humanity is capable of doing to destroy it. Safely Together is part pangolin, part shoe. One of the world’s most trafficked species, the pangolin is now classed as critically endangered. “They’re the only mammal with scales, and their scales are really valued in Chinese medicine. They are really incredible creatures[…] but humans are so clever at finding them, and killing them.”
In Piccinini’s vision, a sneaker-like shell has been engineered for the pangolin’s protection. “It’s some kind of technological shield that allows it to be safe from humans. The work begs the question: does it really matter that this pangolin is not a pangolin any more? Do we need to interfere and change nature for nature to survive? I’m not saying,” she adds, “that this is what I think we should do. The questions are the thing.”
Haunting the gallery is the sound of Scar, by Australian band Cloud Control. It is emanating from Piccinini’s film, We Travel Together, playing in the adjacent space. Described by the artist as a love story, it relates a tender narrative of a girl who befriends a creature. “But she realises that even though she’s falling in love, she isn’t what the creature needs. The creature needs to have a partner of its own species. They don’t need humans the way humans need them.”
There are snouts, saggy, naked flesh, weird ears and tails. We could be revolted, but there is also a handclasp, a gentle strength of cherishing
An award-winning artist, Piccinini, who represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 2003, first showed in Ireland at the 2015 Galway International Arts Festival with Relativity where, alongside the exhibition, her huge Skywhale hovered over the city to the delight of festival goers. “Life came from the sea and morphed into hoofed creatures,” remarked the artist at the time. “Some went back to the deep oceans, and adapted, like the whale mammal. What might have evolved had they taken to the air instead?”
Dark haired, with delicate expressive features, Piccinini is softly spoken yet intense in conversation. She cares, hugely, and the current state of the world troubles her deeply. I remind her that when we spoke, back in 2015, she told me how her studies of anatomy had revealed that we are not, actually, all the same under the skin, no matter how the saying goes. “That feels like a long time ago,” she says. “I feel like I’m a completely different person.” Mortality, both personal and universal, is on her mind. “I did start off being very interested in anatomy and the physical form, and interested in how we relate to difference.
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“We all think that we’re all… that we have standardised insides,” she continues. “But we’re actually really different.” She confirms that no two livers are alike, and by inference, no two human beings, and that’s even before you start getting going on species. The problem is how we relate to difference. “I’m not sure it’s got better,” she says, starkly. Over the years, her work has explored questions of genetics, mutation, the extraordinary potential of stem cells, bio engineering and bio hacking, and the possibility of love between a pair of mopeds.
Her work calls to mind the hyperreal sculptures of fellow Australian, Ron Mueck, but that is just a jumping-off point. Sometimes her human forms, made from silicone and fibreglass, have snouts, claws and odd outcrops of hair. In other cases, hybrid animals appear to appeal simultaneously for our attention and to be left alone. “I have asked the viewer to connect with a personality, a creature that is different from us. And that’s not an easy thing to do, because we’re hard-wired to be suspicious of difference,” the artist says. “So that’s the journey the viewer needs to go on with my work: can empathy happen? Can we imagine what it would be like to be this creature?”
Piccinini had always wanted to be an artist, but was initially dissuaded by her Italian father. To him at the time, she says, artists were Leonardo and Michelangelo, and so she studied economics. “What I learned is that there are many different ways of understanding the world, and in economics you make a lot of assumptions for the models to work. You make assumptions about how humans act and behave, and about the homogeneity among people. It seemed,” she says, “like an ideology rather than a truth. It made me think: wow, the whole financial world is governed by these principles? They just don’t make any sense, and they don’t embody the values that I believe in: like care. You can’t just say ‘production at marginal cost equals marginal revenue’, if you care about people.”
That way of looking at the world is also fundamentally skewed to a certain geographical and social world view, which ignores how some successful tribal societies have worked throughout time, and also vigorously excludes the obvious and increasingly apparent flaws in capitalism. “There are so many things that don’t make it into the model,” Piccinini agrees. In many ways her diorama is a refuge for those beings, and ideas for which “the model” has no space; and that sense of refuge, care and tenderness underpins the strength of her work.
In While She Sleeps, a male creature watches over his companion. There are snouts, saggy, naked flesh, weird ears and tails. We could be revolted, but there is also a handclasp, a gentle strength of cherishing that invites a similar response in us. It’s a delicate balance that flirts with the risk of saccharine manipulation, but never quite falls into that trap. Her Couple, an entwined pair of lovers, are shown embracing – or hiding? – in a small caravan, alongside the main installation. Looking in brings a sense of transgression, of accidentally stumbling on a tender scene that is not meant for the likes of our eyes. It might be a good test of humanity to ask yourself if you want to protect this not-quite-human pair or destroy them for the good of social purity. It is then devastating to realise that some may well come down on the side of the latter.
Exploring the work of Piccinini causes me to wonder if she ever felt she fitted in herself, as a child? “I’m a migrant,” she says. Her grandmother moved from Sligo to England, and her mother from England to Africa. She was born in Sierra Leone, and partially brought up in Italy, before moving to Australia at the age of seven. That sense of roots and rootlessness has informed her work. The family left Sierra Leone because of the civil war there. “There was violence and fear, I wasn’t a refugee on a boat, but they were my formative years. It wasn’t calm.
‘You can’t just say ‘production at marginal cost equals marginal revenue’, if you care about people’
— Patricia Piccinini
“I really do want to fit in,” she continues, describing how quickly she shed her Italian accent on arrival in Australia, something with which so many uprooted children will immediately identify. “That shapes how I make work. I want to make work that comes from being inside a culture, not as an outsider kind of genius omnipotent voyeur. I want to be on the inside because I don’t take that for granted, and I want to talk about the things that are important, from the inside.”
To her, the fundamental most important thing right now is how we understand nature. “We are in the climate crisis, and if you’re a 21st-century artist that doesn’t make it part of your conversation, it’s like you’re not living, you’re not talking to the people in your community. It is so pressing.” Installing the diorama in Galway, her team, led by artistic and life partner, Peter Hennessey, has scavenged the Galway stores for old sets, pallets, plinths, carpets and other festival jetsam.
Taking a peek underneath is like seeing the sedimentary layers of art that have gone before. Each one, in its own way, attempting to explore the crucial issues of the time. There was David Mach and his Oligarch’s Nightmare; John Gerrard’s Flare, a hymn to the burning earth; and Ana Maria Pacheco’s Remember, with its hints of violence, acquiescence and control. Patricia Piccinini’s We Travel Together is another instalment in this powerful series of artists’ pleas for our attention. Whether we actually listen this time is up to us.
Patricia Piccinini will be in conversation with Galway International Arts Festival artistic director Paul Fahy at the Festival Gallery on July 18th at noon, and there is also a Touch Tour on July 18th at 11am. The exhibition runs from July 15th-28th at the Festival Gallery on William Street. Admission free
