Piccinini’s odd creatures discomfort
tic than preternatural, with articulated joints that snap in the way a doll’s arms do, for variety.
A pathway cut through “The Field” prevents our wandering and leads us to a figure. Back turned to the viewer, it could be mistaken at first for a live woman, but as we come around to face her, she is still. In her arms a fleshy, flabby juvenile of indeterminate species nuzzles her breast.
It is called “The Bond” (2016), and it is nothing more than silicone and fiberglass, with store-bought clothing and implanted hair. We want to treat it as something else. The baby’s eyes are limpid, its nostrils damp. The pointed ears at the top of its head poke through soft blond locks, as the woman touches her cheek to its crown.
Who could be insensitive to the pathos of so grossly mismatched a pair? How could we not extend our sympathy? Whether the bond between them was forged in a moment of passion or violence, or it is a compassionate link between rescuer and foundling, the apparent biological transgression could not be their fault.
A pair of ursine creatures huddle in a tent like lovers on the run, survivors of some cataclysm. They embrace but are lost in their own reveries. Their fear fills the space, the canvas enclosure a fragile protection from the barren environment that is the gallery outside and, by implication, the world.
Their nakedness is not incidental. Most of Piccinini’s characters are similarly sexualized, in the age-old tradition of horror tales.
At the same time, for all their obese impurity, these are creatures fresh from the lab, never aging, unscarred by the trials of their existence. Piccinini, of course, is the designer of their appearance, and also of their fate — the single person responsible for their being.
In a video produced by the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, she plays a dewy innocent. Staring into the camera, she intones, “I imagine that perhaps these are the only two creatures of their kind,” as if she were not the one who loosed them upon us.
The sculptures she makes are not creatures she has come across somewhere, but her own propositions. Sure, a novelist might do the same, but what would we say of an author who could not control the monsters she creates?