Artist of the Month: Patricia Piccinini

A lot of science fiction moves through the border zone of wonder and fear, bringing us closer to possibilities which might please or terrify us. Thats sort of the point of it. With literature, this is easy to acheive as the human imagination does the real work and the author only has to provide a few hints and vague idea's and our minds do the rest. For a sculptor, to acheive the same delicate balance of wonder and fear, requires a lot of skill and a pretty good eye for detail. You have to provide more than vague suggestions because the eye is more critical than the imagination (one might even say they contrast perfectly) and yet you have to stay within the bounds of acceptable doubt. In other words, go too far and your work becomes too fantastic to take seriously. It loses its broad appeal and appeals only to the exotic fringes.

Patricia Piccinini has found that delicate balance with some of her work, though not all. Her sculptures can sometimes be a bit too fantastical. For the most part though she manages to capture the grotesque in a way that seems believable. Its not hard to see her statues as being products of a strange future where genetic engineering can provide all manner of cheap child rearing assistance.






Balanced against realistic statues of humans, these anthropomorphic creatures become ever more believable and there fore wonderful and disturbing at the same time. Nurturing babies and nuzzling children in their sleep they are pure science fiction lent physical form.