Creative Types With Virginia Trioli on ABC – Leading contemporary artist Patricia Piccinini is working in her quiet space – a library of books, catalogues, artworks and models of her fantastical imaginings within her large inner-Melbourne studio.
She sketches her ideas and her highly skilled atelier of digital artists, model-makers and wig-makers realise her visions in 3D form. Patricia says her job is to imagine whole new worlds into being.
At the Science Gallery in Carlton she shows Virginia one of her most famous pieces, Kindred, where her ideas of motherhood, nurturing and the very close frontier of science and reality are given form.
Patricia knows her work can attract and repulse at the same time: “I think that there has to be a bit of strangeness in them because otherwise they’d just be too consumable. They’d be too cute.”
Nurturing is central to Patricia’s work and in Adelaide Virginia visits the monumental Big Mother, with its confronting narrative of an ape mothering human.
Patricia reveals her mother’s long illness with cancer and early death drove Patricia’s interest in parental care, and her passion for science: she kept waiting for science to save her mother’s life. Her father was vehemently opposed to her being an artist, but she defied him to attend art school.
The director of the Australian National Gallery Nick Mitzevich says Patricia combines the history of art with a sense of imagination about the 21st century. “She kind of imagines the future in a way that’s neither scary nor optimistic.”
Creative Types With Virginia Trioli on ABC and ABC iview – Tuesday 14 May, 2024 at 9.00pm
You can listen to a TV Central podcast with Virginia Trioli HERE
TV Central ABC content HERE
