The Australian artist exhibits a wilderness of imagined creatures for the Galway International Arts Festival. The works challenge our empathy and revulsion
Humans are a distinctly contrary species. The more we talk of inclusiveness, the more those seen as other are vilified. The more we concern ourselves with preserving our unspoilt wildernesses, the more there is an urge to jet off to see such places.at the Galway Festival Gallery, and populated it with creatures that appear, on first glance, to embody everything that is other.
Haunting the gallery is the sound of Scar, by Australian band Cloud Control. It is emanating from Piccinini’s film, We Travel Together, playing in the adjacent space. Described by the artist as a love story, it relates a tender narrative of a girl who befriends a creature. “But she realises that even though she’s falling in love, she isn’t what the creature needs. The creature needs to have a partner of its own species. They don’t need humans the way humans need them.
Dark haired, with delicate expressive features, Piccinini is softly spoken yet intense in conversation. She cares, hugely, and the current state of the world troubles her deeply. I remind her that when we spoke, back in 2015, she told me how her studies of anatomy had revealed that we are not, actually, all the same under the skin, no matter how the saying goes. “That feels like a long time ago,” she says. “I feel like I’m a completely different person.
Piccinini had always wanted to be an artist, but was initially dissuaded by her Italian father. To him at the time, she says, artists were Leonardo and Michelangelo, and so she studied economics. “What I learned is that there are many different ways of understanding the world, and in economics you make a lot of assumptions for the models to work. You make assumptions about how humans act and behave, and about the homogeneity among people.
In While She Sleeps, a male creature watches over his companion. There are snouts, saggy, naked flesh, weird ears and tails. We could be revolted, but there is also a handclasp, a gentle strength of cherishing that invites a similar response in us. It’s a delicate balance that flirts with the risk of saccharine manipulation, but never quite falls into that trap. Her Couple, an entwined pair of lovers, are shown embracing – or hiding? – in a small caravan, alongside the main installation.
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