by Liam Shearer

As a species, we have a very strange relationship with our own bodies. We know them better than we know anything else, we’re just not very self-aware. They are the vessels through which we experience the world, we so aptly identify human features in other people, but we’re so sensitive about it. It only takes a few seconds to google the term “Sheepshead” and to be deeply disturbed. But if a fish with human teeth is enough to unsettle, we surely crumble when confronted with something more absurd. I remember vividly going to the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh and being confronted with a grotesque pink gum pierced by teeth and decorated with human hair. It shocked me that I could be so disgusted having been exposed to something so natural and familiar. Honestly, it was quite disgusting.

But why is it so shocking? I imagine probably just because we’re also so keenly aware of how delicate the human body is. If not for the security of knowing the exact location and dimension of the human aesthetic, we’d probably never escape the pure dread.

Take ‘Graham’ here, for example. He, being a structure by Aussie sculptor Patricia Piccinini, exists for only one purpose: to remind us of exactly how vulnerable the human body is to a car accidents. Commissioned by the Australian Transport Accident Commission (TAC), ‘Graham’ “highlights the changes we need to make to protect ourselves from our own mistakes on the road.” ‘Graham’ is thus more than a grotesque body-horror, he is the living embodiment of the human body’s weakness – in terms of physical defence AND driving ability.

But honestly, it seems that Piccinini’s work goes beyond the confrontation of vulnerability to tackle existential questions about our places in the world itself. Take 2019’s “No fear of depths”, a humanoid-dolphin embracing a young girl; 2018’s “Kindred”, an ape-human hybrid family or 2018’s “The Couple”, a not-so-human couple embracing in a bed. These collisions of human and inhuman unsettle in the same way the “Sheepshead” fish unsettles. Our conceptions of what is aesthetically “human” and what is not reinforce our security at the top of the food chain and as masters of the earth.

These are of course very rudimental readings of Patricia Piccinini’s fantastically extensive and profoundly complex gallery of sculptures. But if initial reactions invoke such guttural disgust and deep unsettlement, then one thing is clear. If silicone, fibreglass, human hair, clothing and polystyrene can unsettle in such a profound way, then maybe our place in the universe isn’t as uncontested as we’d like to believe.

ST.ART does not own the rights to any of the images above.