Patricia Piccinini Quotes

I think people perceive my creatures as absurd because they look different, but at the same time, they are a little bit familiar. I want people to feel a kind of empathy with them. When you think about it, all nature is kind of strange looking.. in fact, I'm a strange a looking creature.

How does contemporary technology and culture changes our understanding of what it means to be human. What is our relationship with - and responsibilities towards - that which we create.

Most of the work I make uses materials that are a bit outside of the traditional fine art world.

The illusion of life is crucial for the work, otherwise the ideas wouldn't be able to jump across, people wouldn't engage with it.

Perhaps because of this, many have looked at my practice in terms of science and technology, however, for me it is just as informed by Surrealism and mythology.

My practice is focused on bodies and relationships; the relationships between people and other creatures, between people and our bodies, between creatures and the environment, between the artificial and the natural.

I am particularly interested in the way that the everyday realities of the world around us change these relations.

The idea that we can have a new life form, what does it say about the zoo's main purpose, which is to preserve life? What does it say when the artificial and real animal can have the same attraction to people?

I certainly don't see the humour in my work as something that detracts from its seriousness. It's just a way of making difficult messages more palatable.

I feel that there's hardly any irony in my work; if there's anything, there'll be sincerity, which people sometimes find hard to deal with.

Ideas rather than methods are central to they way I work, although drawing plays a central generative role in everything I do.

I don't think 'Dark Heart' has to be malevolent. It conveys a sense of depth. There is a sense of questioning turmoil.

I usually have several things on the go. Whether it is my own drawings for the next work that I am working on while a sculpture is being fabricated or several works at different points in production.

I work with whatever mediums seems best suited to evoking the sorts of thoughts and emotions I am interested in playing with.

In the studio we use a pretty wide range of materials for the sculptures; silicone, fibreglass, human and animal hair, ABS plastic, dental acrylic, traditional and high-tech plasters, stainless steel, automotive paint, plywood, Britannia metal, found objects and taxidermy animals.

I would say my work is anti-ironic.

Melbourne is a fantastic place to work, but it's not the centre of the world.

I started thinking of digital imaging, not photography, in 1994 as it seemed the most appropriate way to deal with ideas of biotechnology and advertising. My practice is conceptual.

Materials are very important to me, and always have been.

We tend to be talking to fabricators in the film and special effects or automotive customisation worlds. That having been said, I'm sure as more and more artists come to use these sorts of media, the expertise amongst conservators is going to keep pace with that.

The way we look at nineteenth-century English social realism and appreciate the working classes of the emerging industrial revolution.

I struggle in life to find a sense of joy in things.

Artists make worlds for people to walk through.

I don't want the ideas to be limited by what I can physically do. The ideas come first.

Thinking is a social process. I talk to everyone from children to anthropologists and philosophers. I try my ideas out on people and they talk back to you. That's how ideas get formed.

In one hundred years time people will look back and think 'these people were really worried about the environment, they were looking at things to do with global warming, and this is why they were making work about these issues'.

As we get older, our world gets smaller and we start to doubt and question. We are really suspicious of difference.

I don't set out to make something that is repulsive and that would scare people. I know that some people don't like what I make, and don't find it cute, but that's hard for me to understand.

It's interesting to work with what's important today, which is meaningful for our everyday lives.

We always use resin instead of polyurethane, even though it takes more work and is in places where it can't be seen, because resin tends to be more UV stable than urethane.

In the studio we spend a lot of time working our what materials will work best and also last. We do tests and come back to them years later to see how they are still performing, and this leads our decisions.

We did have one work where it looked like the fibreglass was discolouring, but it turned out it was reacting to the foam it was packed against in storage. We repaired it and sent it back with better packing.

Now that other people have my works, it's really important to me that what they have has longevity.

I tend to work towards specific exhibitions, so there will often be a big push towards the end when we're finishing off a bunch of stuff.

I put a lot of time and thought into my work, which I see as a sort of respect for both the work and the audience, and I have always been very concerned that the materiality of the work reflects that.

Skywhale is ambiguous. I think she is beautiful, but a lot of people think she is grotesque. You are drawn in and repelled at the same time, and it has to have that dynamic. My work has a certain element of abject mutation, uncertainty and darkness. Even she is dark - I mean she has ten breasts.

I use whatever media I think will best express my ideas and therefore I don't have a lot invested in the idea of photography specifically. I am more interested in Art.

I finished VCA at the height of the last big recession in the early 90s, and seeing that I was not going to be able to join one of the dwindling number of commercial galleries, I started an ARI called the Basement Project which ran for three years. Things came a little at a time and all of a sudden it's 20 years later and I'm still making art, which is really all I ever wanted to do.

If there are moments in my work when people find joy and humour, that's a real success for me.

I have been interested in visual arts since high school and, after realising that I had absolutely no interest in the economics degree I had undertaken at ANU, I started a BFA in Sydney which I completed at VCA in Melbourne.

It's much easier to do something that's seen as being serious because people accept it right away, they don't question what you do, they just accept, because they think you must be right.

Of course, all my work is photographed and I also take quite a lot of photographs of work in production.

The silicone we use is the hardest, most UV stable we can get, and we have done enormous amounts of testing and research to get a paint solution that is extremely hardy and repairable.

I have a database of all my works that I maintain to keep track of works and editions.

Obviously, I don't make an entire edition all at once, so the studio often goes back to produce editions, but that's a bit different. I guess I'm always thinking about the next work.

The studio keeps notes on the details of editions and production processes and the like.

I pretty much keep everything; we have drawers full of samples and tests and every old catalogue and magazine.

I don't connect accessibility with lowest common denominator.

My Father is a photographer, so it was always around. I was trained in painting, so I learnt a lot of skills about composition, light, colour, the formal attributes of images.

A child came up to me and asked 'am I dreaming?' I had a similar experience coming to the Art Gallery of South Australia when I was a child. My mum had done a workshop here and it stayed with me. It's an important formative time.