Patricia Piccinini

Patricia Piccinini with Still Life with Stem Cells.

Patricia Piccinini is an Australian artist born in 1965 in Freetown, Sierra Leone. She emigrated to Australia in 1972 with her family and studied economic history in Canberra before training in Fine Art in Melbourne. In 2003, she was selected as the artist to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale with her sculpture We are Family and Truck Babies. Piccinini works with a wide range of media, including sculpture, video, drawing, installation, digital biotechnologies, and the environment. Her art often reflects her interests in world issues such as bioethics, biotechnologies, and human-animal hybrids. Piccinini’s work often anthropomorphises inanimate objects and presents them with a high degree of industrial finish, revealing the equal influence of 19th Century Surrealism and 20th Century advertising. According to the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia: “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. Piccinini often creates acutely aesthetic and appealing works as a means of discussing complex ethical issues; she is also fascinated by the mechanisms of consumer culture.” Piccinini likes to explore what she calls the “often specious distinctions between the artificial and the natural”. She challenges our classification of life by displaying the relationship and differences between the organic, natural and our constructed material world. This inspires her to combine human physiology and technological development. Piccinini is an inspiring artist who works with fabricators to produce her works.