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We Are All Connected

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We Are All Connected We are all connected Una Meistere 01.03.2021 An interview with artist Patricia Piccinini The Instruments of Life, on show at the Kai Art Centre in Tallinn until April 25, is Australian-based artist Patricia Piccinini’s rst solo exhibition not only in Estonia but in the entire Baltic region. Piccinini is known for her hyperrealistic sculptures of chimeras – grotesque, surreal and sometimes quite eerie beings that nevertheless exude humanity and look like they could just as well inhabit a lucid dream as be the result of a scientic experiment in a laboratory. With her beings, the boundary between reality and ction is further dispelled by the fact that they all have human eyes. Eyes that are disarmingly real, open, emotionally prodding, thoughtful and questioning. Eyes that embody the entire Thrangeis si tofe uhumanses co emotionokies. By and co fnteelings,inuing thus to b confrrowsontinge the stheite, viewer you a withre ag fundamentalreeing to ou questionsr use of c aboutookies. existence, both in the absolutely private sense of Athegr eeindividual and in the sense of humankind’s role, place and responsibility in the planetary ecosystem. Yes, humans are capable of manipulation and do manipulate. They manipulate themselves as well as nature, but – as the current global pandemic has shown – they are unable to control nature or the course of evolution. What are the boundaries and consequences of human permissiveness? How ethical are biotechnology experiments? How inclusive and empathetic are we in relation to the other, to the foreign? How often do we think about the other people, animals, plants, birds and other things that share this planet with us? How often do we think about how they feel, or what it feels like to be them? Piccinini’s work urges us to see beauty in all forms of existence, no matter how deformed or articial they may sometimes be. She is also inspired by themes of fecundity in the broadest sense – the potential of life, empathy and the connection between species. At the same time, her beings remind us how genetically close humans are to other species, how greatly we depend on one another and the responsibility we have for everything we create. Piccinini was born in 1965 in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in West Africa. In 1972 her family moved to Australia, where Piccinini grew up. Today she lives and works in Melbourne. She holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Australian National University in Canberra and a bachelor’s degree in visual arts from the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, where she has been a professor since 2017. Her exhibition We Are Family represented Australia at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. At the beginning of her career, Piccinini spent lots of time in medical museums studying and sketching the objects exhibited there. Still today, she begins each of her works with a sketch, which she and her team then later turn into a three-dimensional object. Each of the sculptures takes approximately one year to complete, and in order to achieve a hyperrealistic look, she uses silicone, breglass and human hair in the process. Patricia Piccinini. Instruments of Life. Exhibition view, 2021. Photo: Mari Volens Piccinini’s solo exhibition The Instruments of Life at the Kai Art Centre includes sculptures created between 2005 and 2020 as well as her new video work titled The Awakening (2020), which is dedicated to the body as a site of production, exploring themes such as rebirth and renewal. Our conversation took place on Zoom, a few days after her gigantic, thirty-metre-high sculptures named Skywhale and Skywhalepapa (who is lled with 4.5 tonnes of air and holds the couple’s nine children in his arms) were presented to an audience of about 2000 spectators across from the National Gallery of Australia. “It’s about how we see a strong masculine gure nurturing his children and how beautiful that looks and the idea that care is not gendered; it’s not just female. It’s available to all of us,” comments Piccinini. But seeing as there was no wind that morning, the Skywhales were unable to take their planned ight over Canberra. “So the balloons didn’t y, but we did inate them. And this meant that the people had to actually stay with them. They had the chance to really look at them, because they didn’t y away. And in the end, people said it was actually OK that the balloons didn’t y, because we had to stay with them. We learned that you can’t control nature, you can’t tell nature what to do. We want the balloons to y, but it’s up to nature to decide,” Piccinini says later in our conversation. The eyes are very special in your sculptures. And your hybrid creatures, or chimeras, have human eyes. What do eyes mean for you as a symbol? How do you make them? And how do you make the eyes of your creatures so alive, so human? It seems that you’ve put a lot of thought into them. I make artwork for humans, so the eyes are vital. We’re one of the few species that have whites around our eyes, and this helps us to “read” each other better. We tend to understand the way we’re related through the eyes and eye contact. As humans, we tend to understand the world predominantly through visual means. If I made artwork for dogs, I wouldn’t be making works where eyes are really important, because dogs understand the world through smell. They don’t really care that much about eyes. They understand what you’ve done, who you are, your place in the world, your history and so on all by how you smell. A lot of my work in sculpture deals with the morphology of the body, how the body is placed. In large part this is what determines how viewers will perceive the work. If the eyes are downcast, if they’re looking straight at the viewer, or if they’re confronting our inner world – these things are all very legible to us. The eyes in my work are mostly very human, which creates a connection between us and the creatures both emotionally and genetically. However, there have to be subtle differences. In Kindred (2018), the mother’s eyes are actually quite orange. We tried to use dark eyes, but they didn’t look right. It took quite a while to work on them. They look pretty natural, but they’re actually really orange, and they t the face beautifully. The eyes create a subconscious aspect of our communication that we’re not really aware of, but it’s there. My studio makes all the eyes for the sculptures. When I rst started making this kind of work, I worked with a man who makes prosthetic eyes for medical purposes. However, he was very hard to work with, because he wouldn’t ever change the eyes. If I needed them bigger or smaller or a different colour, he always said no. It made me realise that we had to make them ourselves in the studio. It’s taken us quite a few years to develop the process. They’re all hand-painted, in acrylic and resin, with a depression for the iris and the lens on top, which means they’re not completely spherical. Patricia Piccinini. The Loafers, 2018. Courtesy of the Artist Your Shoeform sculptures of plants growing out of stiletto heels (some of which are featured in your exhibition in Tallinn) are surrealistically beautiful. On the one hand, they make us think about the beauty of plants and the beauty of the connection between plant forms. On the other hand, they remind us that nature will survive, it will recover, it will take over, but we as a species are the ones who might become extinct after what we’ve done to nature, and we urgently have to take steps to re- establish our lost partnership with nature. What is the story of the Shoeform sculptures, how was the idea born? Maybe you have a completely different interpretation? Certainly my ideas are related to how you see it. My work is a lot about the boundaries between things, the boundaries between us and other species, or technology and nature. Much like the gurative sculptures, the Shoeforms are chimeras, except more extreme. Shoeforms are chimeras of the organic and the manufactured. What I’m really interested in with those works is the idea of how we categorise the world and how we impose these fairly arbitrary boundaries around themselves, and between ourselves and others. With Shoeforms, I’m imagining something, a metaphor really, that collapses these boundaries. I’m interested in this because, when you create a boundary, like saying “Oh, this is natural, and this is articial,” then you’re creating a disconnection between us and the world. But that isn’t working anymore, because we only care about the “us” side of the boundary. Patricia Piccinini. Shoeform (Tresses), 2019. Photo: Mari Volens And this brings me to your comment about the survival of nature. Will it recover? Will it take over after we’re gone? All of this presupposes a disconnection between “us” and “nature”. This is a problem of putting ourselves on one side of the boundary. Are humans not part of nature? Are we not natural? Why do we do this? For example, the notion of “black” people is actually relatively new. White people created this distinction so that we could distance ourselves from black people, as a justication for slavery.
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