Patricia Piccinini

Piccinini, who studied economic history and painting, is an Australian artist who creates intermediary beings out of silicone and plastic that are either half animal and half human, or are combinations of the cyber-technological and the human. At first glance, these hyperrealistic deformed figures, with their hairy body parts and their sticky inside-out bits, seem sinister and inaccessible. The artist, however, imbues her cross-bred beings with a sense of human dignity thereby rendering them accessible to the viewer. Her work poses fundamental ethical and moral questions about the value of life, and explores definitions about what might constitute life at the very boundaries between nature, technology, birth, creation and death.