Patricia Piccinini

Patricia Piccinini (born 1965 in Freetown, Sierra Leone) is an Australian artist who works in a variety of media, including painting, video, sound, installation, digital prints, and sculpture.

Her works focus on "unexpected consequences", conveying concerns surrounding bio-ethics and help visualize future dystopias.

Piccinini was born in Sierra Leone in 1965 to Teodoro and Agnes Piccinini.

She moved to Canberra, Australia when she was 7 years old.

She attended Red Hill Primary, Telopea Park High School and Narrabundah College (a secondary college).

After high school, Piccinini began studying economics at Australian National University.

Later she completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1991.

‘The Mutant Genome Project’ (1995), features commercially available designer babies called LUMP (Lifeform with Unevolved Human Properties).

The Protein Lattice series was inspired by the famous Vacanti mouse experiment in 1996.

The experiment formed a human ear on a rat.

The research’s objective was to learn more about cells, and how humans can possibly regrow body part.

Her ‘Protein Lattice’ (1997) series features nude models posing with computer-generated mutant rats.

The two series explored the commercial side of science and brought up the question of ethics.

According to her 2002 National Gallery of Victoria biography:

"Piccinini has an ambivalent attitude towards technology and she uses her artistic practice as a forum for discussion about how technology impacts upon life. She is keenly interested in how contemporary ideas of nature, the natural and the artificial are changing our society. Specific works have addressed concerns about biotechnology, such as gene therapy and ongoing research to map the human genome... she is also fascinated by the mechanisms of consumer culture.'"

In 2002, Piccinini presented 'Still Life with Stem Cells', which features a series of flesh-like masses.

As she herself says:

"Stems cells are base cellular matter before it is differentiated into specific kinds of cells like skin, liver, bone or brain. Pure unexpressed potential, they contain the possibility for transformation into anything. They are the basic data format of the organic world. Like digital data, their specificity lies in that, while they are intrinsically nothing, they can become anything. They are biomatter for the digital age.

I am interested in how this changes our idea of the body.

Already our understanding of the human genome leads us to imagine that we understand the construction of the body at its most intimate level; the stem cell provides us with a generic, plastic material from which we can construct it.

In the last ten years, the body has gone from something that is uniquely produced to something that can be reproduced.

This transformation has already occurred, with very little fuss given its magnitude.

The question of whether this is a good or a bad thing is both too simplistic and a little academic.

As with so much of this biotechnology, the extraordinary has already become the ordinary.

The real question is 'what are we going to do with it'.

Still life with Stem Cells is one possible answer."

In 2003, Piccinini represented Australia at the 50th Venice Biennale with a hyperrealist sculpture of her distinctive anthropomorphic animals.

In 2003, Piccinini represented Australia at the 50th Venice Biennale.

The work exhibited was 'We Are Family', an exhibition which displayed humanlike mutant figures behaving like humans.

'The Long-Awaited' (2008) was a later work attempting to explore the theme of empathy through a lifelike sculpture of a child cradling a manatee-human hybrid.

The Skywhale was a work commissioned by the ACT Government for its Centenary year.

The ABC described the work as a "hot air balloon in the shape of a tortoise-like animal featuring huge dangling udders made from four hectares of nylon".

The budget for the project was $300,000 and has been the subject of comments made by ACT Chief Ministers Jon Stanhope and Andrew Barr.

In 2014 she received the Artist Award from the Melbourne Art Foundation's Awards for the Visual Arts.

Before finding the medium of sculpture, Piccinini experimented with world-building through photography and digital enhancements.

In a 2014 interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, Piccinini said of her work, "It's about evolution, nature – how nature is such a wonderful thing, we're just here to witness it, it's not here for us – genetic engineering, changing the body."

Following her 2014 win in the Melbourne Art Foundation's Awards, she went on to say that:

In 2016 The Art Newspaper named Piccinini with her "grotesque-cum-cute, hyper-real genetics fantasies in silicone" the most popular contemporary artist in the world after a show in Rio de Janeiro attracted over 444,000 visitors.

Natasha Bieniek's portrait of Piccinini was a finalist for the 2022 Archibald Prize.

In 2016 she was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Visual and Performing Arts by the University of Melbourne's Victorian College of the Arts and appointed their Enterprise Professor.