During a Cairns Art Gallery residency program in 2018, internationally acclaimed artist Patricia Piccinini researched aspects of the reef and rainforest of Far North Queensland. This research informed a new body of works exhibited at Cairns Art Gallery in 2019 entitled Life Clings Closest.

Born in 1965 in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Patricia Piccinini lives and works in Melbourne, Victoria. Her works of sculpture, photography, video and installation explore the advances of bioscience and technology. Piccinini is internationally known for her life-like mutant creatures fashioned of silicone and hair, which question scientific progress and ethics.

Since the early 1990s, Piccinini has produced hybrid human and animal forms to encourage discussions about bio-technological interventions. In combining the cute and the grotesque and inviting maternal instincts for nurturing despite aversion to strange beings, she elicits empathy regardless of how monstrous, deformed or artificial her creatures may appear.

Life Clings Closest brought together works from the last twenty years of Piccinini’s practice, as well as a new group of seven new works inspired by the unique environment of Far North Queensland. Together they explored and celebrated the wondrous ecology of the region, while posing the question of how it will cope with the overwhelming challenges it faces.

Cairns Art Gallery purchased Piccinini’s sculpture, No fear of depths, from the exhibition. This work explores the relationship between nature and people, between the artificial and the natural, and between creatures and the environment. Embodied in the work are the elements of paradox and hybridity, important themes in Piccinini’s work. Whilst in Cairns, Piccinini became increasingly excited about the rarity, obscurity and fecundity of life forms in Far North Queensland, and about the opportunity to produce new works that would broaden the artistic and conceptual parameters of her practice.

No fear of depths was purchased by the Gallery in 2019 with the assistance of the Foundation. It is a significant work that aligns with the Gallery’s research interests in the world’s tropic zone, and Cairns Art Gallery is the only collecting institution in Australia with an edition of this work.

Filmed by Dr Russell Milledge MFA PhD