Patricia Piccinini’s family moved from Freetown, Sierra Leone to Canberra, Australia in 1972. P. Piccinini currently lives with her husband and creative partner Peter Hennessy (b. 1968) and their two children on Wurundjeri country in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia. She holds an honorary Doctorate of Visual and Performing Arts from the University of Melbourne, a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, and a Bachelor of Arts in economic history from the Australian National University, Canberra. P. Piccinini is Enterprise Professor in Visual Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
P. Piccinini works across a range of media, including drawing, video, sculpture and photography. She has been actively producing and exhibiting her work since the 1990s, throughout Australia, North America, Europe and Asia, along with more than one hundred solo exhibitions. One of her best-known works is The Young Family (2003), which was shown in her exhibition We Are Family in the Australian Pavilion for the 50th Venice Biennale. The Young Family is a sculptural work of a pig-like mother creature who watches lovingly over her three babies, feeding and playing. This pleasant family scene is undercut by the suggestion that these creatures have been bred for human organ transplants. In this work P. Piccinini asks us to question what is more valuable, the life of this creature or the life of a human child who might need an organ transplant to survive. As she has done through much of her practice, here P. Piccinini explores the conflict between our ethics and our emotions, and the shifting boundaries between what is and what is not human in a technologically mediated world.

A more recent project of P. Piccinini’s is Skywhales: Every Heart Sings (2021-2022), a tour following two hot-air-balloon sculptures. Skywhale (2013) is a large fantastical whale-like creature that has evolved to fly instead of swim, distinguished by its multiple and prominent gas-filled udders. Commissioned for Canberra’s centenary celebrations, Skywhale has filled the sky with its strange, maternal presence at various public festivals and tours in Australia and internationally, including Dark Mofo (Tasmania, 2013), the Trans Arts Tokyo Festival (2014), the Galway International Arts Festival (2015) and ComCiència at CCBB (Brasilia, 2015). In 2019 the Skywhale was donated to the National Gallery of Australia and the following year her male counterpart, Skywhalepapa who carries their babies, launched. Skywhales: Every Heart Sings incorporates music, knitting and baking. P. Piccinini also produced a children’s book and an online learning resource for primary school students that explores concepts of love, care and responsibility in relation to ourselves, families and other living beings.

Throughout her practice, P. Piccinini continues to use Surrealism and mythologies to explore relationships between human and creature, between creatures and the environment, and between the artificial and the natural. While P. Piccinini’s work can provoke horror and disgust through its abject hybrids, it continues to inspire and bring joy to many, encouraging a greater love for difference.