City of Gaia

Patricia Piccinini

〈Metaflora (Timelapse)〉, 2015.

Three-channel video, color, sound, 3 min. 5 sec., 3 min. 4 sec., 12 min. 31 sec. (each).
Courtesy of the artist.

〈Boot Flower〉, 2015.

Silicone, fiberglass, human hair, 102.9 × 100 × 60 cm.
Courtesy of the artist.

〈Meadow〉, 2016.

2016, ABS & PPE Plastic, dimensions variable.
Courtesy of 798CUBE.

A modern natural landscape imagined by Patricia Piccinini, Meadow prompts the audience to contemplate what nature means in our constantly changing modern society. The solid white flowers have forms somewhere between a plant and an animal, and are strangely reminiscent of Neolithic Venus figurines. In this work, Piccinini presents a world with blurred boundaries and fluid categories. The space composed of these flowers with different sizes, directions, and features demonstrates the diversity and complexity of nature.

Bootflower, a sculpture that looks like a boot with human hair and skin, represents both a fleshy animal, a plant with roots in the ground, and a flower that is coming into bloom. It also looks somewhat like a mushroom, showing that the artist draws attention to fungi as she takes a particular interest in creating new boundary-breaking species. The fact that fungi are unique organisms that are neither plants nor animals intrigues Piccinini, so she has focused on them as subject for her work. There appears another mushroom-like flower in Metaflora (Timelapse). This video work explores hybridity by focusing on hybridization of plants and animals. It shows the remarkable vitality and resilience of nature through the repetitive cycle of growth, maturation, and dissolution of a peculiar life. Piccinini’s work commonly features flowers.

Exploring artistic means of rendering gender and sexuality, she adopts flowers, the reproductive organ of a plant, as an image to talk about subjects such as sexuality, reproduction, and fecundity, avoiding stereotypical and static representations of sexuality.