IMOGEN NEALE delves into the creationism of Patricia Piccinini's In Another World, currently on show at City Gallery Wellington.


A STAR FIGURE of any fairytale or carnivalesque narrative is that of the soothsayer; the crystal ball gazing bent old woman with the cackling voice who tells you ‘this is how it could one day be’. Some people discard her visions as rubbish; ‘you hear or see what you want to hear or see’ they say. Others feel that to gaze into the ball is to cheat; to flick to the last page of the book and ruin the ending; no matter how happy or sad it may be. Others still don’t look because they partly believe and partly don’t believe and such a suspension leaves them on the ‘I don’t want to look just incase there is some truth to it’ camp. Sympathetic to this is the saying ‘I don’t want to think about it’ or, ‘it doesn’t bear thinking about’ – the idea being that is going to happen anyway and when it does, well, it’s bound to be less than ideal.

Patricia Piccinini’s show at the Wellington City Gallery, In Another Life, confronts such ideas by asking: what questions can we ask now, what preparations can we make now, what do we already know now that may help us with where we are going. Such questions are reflected in the show's title, In Another Life. The suggestion being of course that if we could or would answer some of these questions – what might the result be? What might the Other life look like? As Piccinini comments in the show's program:

I’ve always liked the idea of creating an entire world of my own; so that each work in the show is somehow an object or an image from that other world. This world is not the same as our world but it’s not very different.

She adds:

I see it as kinda, reflecting the present. While the things I create don’t actually exist, the ideas, the context and perhaps even the technologies exist. These technologies and creatures don’t even exist but perhaps they should.

Like the questions themselves, Piccinini’s answers – in the form of photographs, models, sculptures and video installations – make you feel immediately uncomfortable and acutely aware of how close that crystal ball someday, oneday, is to being now – this day.


The show is split into three narratives; Nature’s Little Helpers, Cyclepups and standalone pieces such as Truck Babies and When my baby (when my baby). The former works stand alone in the East wing, while the later pieces fill the West wing. Although this split may be due to basic space constraints, the time it takes you to walk across the foyer and into the other wing allows you to catch your breath and gather your thoughts – no matter if you walk East to West, West to East.

Confronting people with the pragmatic way we decide how much something's life and liberty is worth – and how quickly we reevaluate that value – is one of the ideas behind the Nature’s Little Helpers' collection. Made from silicon, fiberglass and plywood amongst other things, the creatures Piccinini has created are unsettling, predominantly I imagine, because they look so alive, so possible and yet so undeniably genetically engineered (and perhaps therefore, not possible, yet). Nature’s Little Helpers: The Young Family 2002-2003, is a prime example of this. Splayed out on her side with little underlings suckling at her swollen teats, the creature looks, at fist glance, exactly like a large sow. On closer inspection, however, her pig-ness starts to feel wrong; her eyes look too animated, her mouth too much like a smiling mothers, her skin peppered with hair that looks just like the stubbly down on your father’s forearms. Piccinini notes, via the podcast you can download in the foyer:

To make this work... we went to look at a sow that had just given birth. She gave birth to twelve piglets. We saw her just after she had given birth ... one of things that I remember from that experience is that when the mother was trying to get up she looked at us and she just, didn’t look like a pig, she looked really weary and tired and like a mother and I wanted that in the work. The beginning of the work is that we could potentially grow human organs in other species and I wanted to introduce the idea of sympathy for the animal that was growing these organs but, at the same time, I’m asking how much sympathy would we have for this creature if we needed the organs that she could provide.

Thus Piccinini forces us to ask ourselves: if we needed these piglets, their cells, their organs and/or their enzymes, how valuable would that make the sow? Further, if we needed sows that could suckle humans, how far would we go towards creating pigs that were part human, that did have eyes like our mothers, that did have hair like our fathers, that could, ultimately, experience and understand life with a human-like faculty. And, if we did create such a pig, would we therefore value it as much as we value human life?


The same can be said for The Embrace; which is a very realistic female mannequin with a creature clinging to her face in either an embrace or full attack and Offspring and Progenitor – two works that focus on the demise of the Leadbeater’s Possum. Piccinini highlights, through her creatures, the ways we could engineer or adapt these animals to the changing environment; if only we thought their lives were valuable enough to save or protect. Rather than altering the creature itself, however, she has created ‘overseers’ or little helpers that could work with the Leadbeater possum – thus, she gives one such little helper big sharp teeth to gnaw through trees that will then fall so they may hollow them out so the Leadbeater can have the hollow tree (its natural habitat) it needs in order to survive.

Interestingly, while these creatures create a moment of chaotic questions – a moment where you look at them and think – why do we need these creatures? How far away are we from having them? Are we really going to have to go down this path to retain our flora and fauna... It is the four graphite drawings that best capture the essence of what Piccinini is trying to get at. Perhaps this is because the drawings place a child – the penultimate human jewel – and a creature – the penultimate human anxiety – in very close proximity. Looking at the drawings you want to find the child’s guardian and ask; ‘do you know this animal? Is it safe? Will the child be okay?’ Or, alternatively, you want to remove the child from the drawing, lift it away from this creature that you can’t help but feel very weary of. As Piccinini notes:

Each child represents another life; another possibility. Also, babies don’t make judgments, the world is all new to them – they just take it in... In these works it is us, the humans, the children that are vulnerable. As a viewer we might feel uncomfortable about the situation these children are in, we might feel uncomfortable on their behalf – they are kinda just too close. But I think this reflects our general sense of unease when confronted by the possibilities of new technologies.

The exhibition is powerful because it confronts you with wondrous visual spectacles – wondrous because they are such elaborately created works, and wondrous because they are so futuristic, so surreal and yet so familiar. Furthermore, the pieces combine to leave you with a very curious taste in your mouth – something that stays with you and haunts you throughout the day – that rolls everything you come upon around in a residue of its own questioning. Neither a blatant protest for or against genetic engineering, In Another Life serves to generate some pertinent questions that address the ways and methods we are going to use, if at all (and if so, when) to prepare for our future: humans, animals and nature’s little helpers.