Nature's Little Helpers

Patricia Piccinini

"Things are different today,"
I hear every mother say
Cooking fresh food for a husband's just a drag
So she buys an instant cake and she burns her frozen steak
And goes running for the shelter of a mother's little helper
And two help her on her way, get her through her busy day

Doctor please, some more of these
Outside the door, she took four more
What a drag it is getting old

Mother’s Little Helper, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, 1965

Some things, once done, are not easily undone. We might recognise later that we should not have done them in the first place, however undoing them is not so easy. Like an egg, which once broken cannot be unbroken, when something is created, it is difficult to contain. This stands as much for a work of art as it does for a genetically modified creature. Anyone who thinks that they can maintain control of the things that they create is fooling themselves. Whether it is genetically modified canola, the cane toad, a work on the secondary market or an image on the internet, once the thing leaves our hands all we can do is watch.

A number of strands of my practice come together in this exhibition. Different media and iconographies that I have explored over the past several years appear together. However, all of these works spring from the same set of ideas and concerns. Creation, birth, responsibility, babies, the changing nature of the environment and our relationship with it, the increasingly nebulous boundaries between the technological and the natural world ­ each of these works explore these same ideas in different ways.

It would be a mistake to see this show as a series of individual projects separated by media. To me it is a single world, where each work expresses a different facet of the same core concerns. These works need to be together, because no one work can tell the whole story of anything.

There are a few main stories that intertwine in this show. The first, told primarily through the figurative silicone sculptures and photographs, is about doing the wrong things for the right reasons and whether we can use technology to solve environment problems. The second story is more general and can be found in all the works. It is about the way that some stuff begins to take over places where it doesn’t really belong. A third story is about babies. Actually, it is not really a story; it is more a recurring image. Everywhere you look in this show there are babies. I have just had a baby myself. People now ask me whether I think that experience will change my work. I’m not sure, but there have been babies in my work since the early nineties so there is no dramatic change there.

The ‘Nature’s Little Helpers’ series of sculptures and photos focus quite specifically on the first story. The sculptures present a series of creatures that I have designed to ‘assist’ a series of the endangered Australian animals. In the photographs, we follow more closely one of these creatures, ‘The Bodyguard (for the Golden Helmeted Honeyeater)’. It is very seductive to think that we could find a simple technological solution to complex ecological problems such as extinction. It is far more exciting to talk about genetic engineering than to designate a large area of habitat/real estate as national park so that dozens or even hundreds of native species might be given a better chance of survival. We have a long history of scientifically introducing new stuff into our environment in order to make it better, however it has rarely worked. Yet our relatively recent understanding of genetics seems to have left us ready to add yet more stuff in an unprecedented way. Why do we think we have it all figured out now?

The sculptures present a series of quite considered propositions for helper species while photographs play out the possibility of the ‘success’ of such an idea. With the sculptures, I have been able to present my creature ideas in a fashion that is direct and strangely believable. People are fascinated by the tiny details, the moles and wrinkles, which almost forces them to accept the possibility of their existing. I also deliberately steer clear of too much sci-fi or horror in my creatures. They stay rooted in the possibilities of real animals. These creatures are almost too easy to accept ­ the real animal world is just as weird anyway. Like the extraordinary bio-geno-tech discoveries that these creatures relate to, the bizarre and unbelievable becomes the obvious and commonplace almost instantly.

I am as interested in the emotional outcomes of such transformations as I am in the conceptual or ethical. Sometimes I worry that my work isn’t ‘cool’ enough; it is warm, cute, emotive, melodramatic even. Nowhere is this more evident than in my drawings. In many ways, I see these drawings as central to the exhibition. My practice starts with drawings, and while it often then finds its way into a variety of other media, in this case it has actually ended up there. These drawings explore one of the central themes of my practice; our relationship with the things that we create, in this case my helper creatures. There is a combination of innocence, trust and vulnerability in the children that I find quite apposite as a way to express our relationship with much of the new technologies that now impact on our world and our bodies. I love the way that they seem to get on so well together, but it also worries me a little.