Through Love …
Pairing renowned artist Patricia Piccinini and Australian modernist Joy Hester, this exhibition presents works that show the incredible spectrum of love and connection.
Patricia Piccinini and Joy Hester
Through love … is a poignantly ambitious presentation of the work of two wellknown Australian artists whose works address the subjective experience of love. Ink and paper drawings by late modernist painter Joy Hester have been juxtaposed with sculptures, video works, photographs and drawings by Patricia Piccinini that challenge and expand our understanding of who might care and what the nature and experience of that care might be. Drawing on contemporary concerns of climate change, urbanization and technology, Through Love … questions the fictional nature-culture divide, illuminating the potential for transformation through empathy.
And indeed empathy is a central tactic of the show. Most of the works in the show evoke a response that sits somewhere in the overlap between curiosity, horror, empathy and wonder. Beyond The Young Family (2002), one of Piccinini’s best known works at the gallery’s entrance, The Lovers (2011) lights up a darkened corner of the central space. The high-fidelity gloss of the two scooters caught in techno-romantic embrace is worlds away from the fleshy, hair-covered organicism of her humananimal hybrids, yet the emotion we feel – a mix that includes both fascination and reserve – is the same. We don’t normally think of scooters or tyres as having the ability to love, but in this era of bioengineering, artificial intelligence and robotics, the old boundaries are blurring.
Hester’s potent watercolour portraits function as counterpoints to Piccinini’s sculptures. The emotionally worn subjects of Hester’s 1949 Love series underline the parallel potency of Piccinini’s works, and emphasize the fraught nature of what it can mean to care, and care deeply. Turning from Hester’s Mother and Child (1955) to pieces such as Piccinini’s Kindred (2018) we see the same liquid eyes; both register the emotional vulnerability of familial care. The possibilities for an expanded spectrum of affection here are manifest, from the human-to-human bonding depicted in
“Drawing on contemporary concerns of climate change, urbanization and technology,
Through Love … questions the fictional nature-culture divide, illuminating the potential for transformation through empathy.”
Hester’s haunting portraits, to the creatureto-creature bonding and human-to-creature bonding in pieces like The Lovers.
Several of Piccinini’s “childhood” pieces consider other forms of human-tocreature love. Presented as singular scenes, these works continue to work an uneasy balance between horror and wonder that in many ways underpins the show and much of Piccinini’s oeuvre. The anxiety evoked by the gaping mouth paired with youthful curiosity in Doubting Thomas (2006), for instance, gives way to sublime wonder in Balasana (2009), and to domestic unease in the photographs of suburban groups of youths that line the wall. These are genuinely engaging offerings that create intrigue as much through their content as through their uncanny realism.
The show culminates in Piccinini’s newest work, which occupies a crimsonhued room at the end of the main space. Set somewhat apart from the earlier, more unsettling scenes is a sculpture of two embracing ape-like figures on a circular dais, framed by a wall mural. Like Piccinini’s other works, Sanctuary (2018) foregrounds twenty-first century challenges including ageing populations and the impending global extinction of vast numbers of species, against the backdrop of our ever-accelerating technological prowess.
Piccinini has noted the reluctance of female artists to make work about love based on its traditional associations with femininity and the risk of falling prey to clichés. Rather than shying away, Through love … embraces the possibilities for affective transformation through care. Both profoundly tender and gently provocative, Through love … confronts the discomfort we feel as contemporary conditions coalesce, confronting us with new environmental and societal challenges – all the while celebrating the transformative possibilities of care in the increasingly complex encounters between humans and the natural world. A