One of the few events continuing as part of RISING,a new winter arts festival that was largely cancelled due to the recent COVID-19 lockdown,Piccinini’sA Miracle Constantly Repeated is a carefully crafted world of creatures,sculpture,installation,video and sound. It poses questions central to Piccinini’s work. The artist cultivates harmonious relations between nature and technology,explores how we often mistakenly align what’s conventionally beautiful with what’s valuable,and demonstrates how positions of power can be tempered by care.
As one of Australia’s foremost artists,Piccinini has for three decades been asking these questions through human and chimera sculptures,alongside public works such as the Skywhale hot air balloon.
This show is almost a miniature version of the artist’s momentous survey at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art in 2018. Yet Piccinini’s life forms appear more intimate in the Flinders Street Station rooms,sitting among the paint-peeled walls and the ageingFrench Renaissance style architecture. Piccinini seems to ask:if a space is left to its own devices,what new life forms might emerge?
Each of the multiple rooms is its own world:an abandoned office,life under the sea,a young man’s bedroom,an interspecies nightclub. After first encountering the views of Melbourne offered by the space,one is quickly submerged into a rainforest of small hybrid creatures,before moving to a larger room featuring recent works such as a sapling creature held lovingly on a man’s shoulders,and brightly coloured silicone stilettos that morph into plants. Then there is a sculpture stopping almost everyone:two young people holding a washing basket with an injured koala inside.
Distinctly Australian,it feels reminiscent of the recent bushfires. But it’s also a scene common across Piccinini’s work:creatures are placed in an intimate relationship,often compassionate. The scenes convey how the ability to love,or to at least care,is often mistaken as being innate and uncontrollable;what if we thought of care as a moral choice,a responsibility.
Next is a video of a young female returning a lost creature to its home,and walking different landscapes from the realist streets to a mesmerising dreamscape reminiscent of a flattened moon. From here we find a couple embraced in the bed of a man’s room,before moving into a glowing,glorious field of white tendril-like plants growing from the floor and ceiling.