Teratomania: Part Two

Patricia Piccinini (b. 1965) - Leo, 2006

'I am as interested in the emotional outcomes of such transformations as I am in the conceptual or ethical. Sometimes I worry that my work isn’t ‘cool’ enough; it is warm, cute, emotive, melodramatic even. Nowhere is this more evident than in my drawings...These drawings explore one of the central themes of my practice; our relationship with the things that we create, in this case my helper creatures. There is a combination of innocence, trust and vulnerability in the children that I find quite apposite as a way to express our relationship with much of the new technologies that now impact on our world and our bodies. I love the way that they seem to get on so well together, but it also worries me a little.'

Patricia Piccinini (from Nature's Little Helpers)

Reading:

Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism - Elizabeth Grosz

Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory and Futures - Elizabeth Grosz

Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely - Elizabeth Grosz

Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies - Elizabeth Grosz

Viewing:

The Fly (1986) - d. David Cronenberg

Teratomania: Part One

Patricia Piccinini (b. 1965) - Undivided, 2005


'Some things, once done, are not easily undone. We might recognise later that we should not have done them in the first place, however undoing them is not so easy. Like an egg, which once broken cannot be unbroken, when something is created, it is difficult to contain. This stands as much for a work of art as it does for a genetically modified creature. Anyone who thinks that they can maintain control of the things that they create is fooling themselves. Whether it is genetically modified canola, the cane toad, a work on the secondary market or an image on the internet, once the thing leaves our hands all we can do is watch.'

Patricia Piccinini (from Nature's Little Helpers)

Essays and images are available at: http://www.patriciapiccinini.net/