Patricia Piccinini

Patricia Piccinini is one of Australia’s most renowned and recognized contemporary artists. Her work Street, 3.10am is from The Fitzroy Series, created in 2011 for the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) in Fitzroy.

The series was photographed in Fitzroy and Collingwood.

The creature in this work is a Bottom Feeder, designed to eat rubbish; here it scavenges the yellow topped Yarra bins.

As such, its role is important but unsightly. These creatures belong in the increasingly dominant urban ecosystem and interact with the dominant species: the human.

As Patricia notes: The world I create exists somewhere between the one we know and one that is almost upon us.

However, what I imagine is neither the nightmare future environmental ruin nor the brave new world of perfect scientific progress.

Instead I focus on the internal, emotional lives of the new creatures that might emerge, along with questions about the kinds of relationships that might come to light alongside them. My creatures, while strange and unsettling, are not threatening.

Instead, it is their vulnerability that often most comes to the fore.

Patricia Piccinini represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 2003, and has exhibited widely both locally and internationally. She works in a variety of media including sculpture, video, sound, installation, digital photography and painting.

Her photographic works use a combination of live photography and computer-generated creatures, which are seamlessly integrated into the images. The artist has been working with this medium since the mid-1990s.

Digital c-type photograph, 100cm x 160cm (unframed) (2011)