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Nature's Little Helpers
Project: What happened to nature?
Project: What happened to nature?
silicone, acrylic, leather, human hair, clothing, timber
from We Are Family
I had the opportunity to attend the Hug exhibit on Friday, which features some of the more recent works of Patricia Piccinini (including Nature's Little Helpers). She does an excellent job capturing the complex relationship between humans and other animals, technology and nature. Provocative and absolutely stunning. ~ ~ ~ Highly recommended!
Silicone, fibreglass, human hair, plywood, leather, clothing
from Nature's Little Helpers
Fantastic, hyper-realistic sculptures of customized life forms are featured in Hug, the first U.S. survey of work by Australian artist Patricia Piccinini. Informed by recent advances in and complex questions raised by genetic research, Piccinini’s sculptures, photographs, and video installations examine the precarious relationships among animals, nature, science, and technology.
The artist has long focused on the representation of humans and animals, emphasizing the capacity for manipulation and enhancement through biotechnological intervention. Her artwork explores potential, often ambiguous, interactions between humans, animals, and human–animal hybrids. For Piccinini, humanity bears physical and ethical responsibility for experimentation with the natural and the artificial; her artwork challenges us to embrace, for better or worse, the unanticipated consequences of those investigations.
Silicone, fibreglass, human hair, plywood, leather, clothing
from Nature's Little Helpers
Patricia Piccinini
"Things are different today,"
I hear every mother say
Cooking fresh food for a husband's just a drag
So she buys an instant cake and she burns her frozen steak
And goes running for the shelter of a mother's little helper
And two help her on her way, get her through her busy day
Doctor please, some more of these
Outside the door, she took four more
What a drag it is getting old
Mother’s Little Helper, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, 1965
Some things, once done, are not easily undone. We might recognise later that we should not have done them in the first place, however undoing them is not so easy. Like an egg, which once broken cannot be unbroken, when something is created, it is difficult to contain. This stands as much for a work of art as it does for a genetically modified creature. Anyone who thinks that they can maintain control of the things that they create is fooling themselves. Whether it is genetically modified canola, the cane toad, a work on the secondary market or an image on the internet, once the thing leaves our hands all we can do is watch.
A number of strands of my practice come together in this exhibition. Different media and iconographies that I have explored over the past several years appear together. However, all of these works spring from the same set of ideas and concerns. Creation, birth, responsibility, babies, the changing nature of the environment and our relationship with it, the increasingly nebulous boundaries between the technological and the natural world each of these works explore these same ideas in different ways ...
Silicone, fibreglass, human hair, teddy, bed and linen
from Nature's Little Helpers
more of Patricia's works
silicone, acrylic, human hair, clothing, carpet
from We Are Family
ABS plastic and automotive paint
from Nest
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