Born in Sierre Leone, Patricia Piccinini migrated to Australia as a child. She now lives and works in Melbourne. Her practice has gradually moved from painting towards sculpture, digital photography and video installation.
In recent years, Piccinini has collaborated with professional car modellers and custom painters to make objects out of fibreglass and ABS plastic, each immaculately finished with a lustrous layer of automotive paint. The shapes and surfaces of these works, although abstract, are unmistakably car-like. The artist suggests: 'These are not miniature cars or even bits of cars welded together, they are essence of car; they are lumps of "car-ness"'.
Piccinini uses these bite-size chunks of car to explore the way we are seduced by our everyday interactions with things, despite our understanding of their negative aspects. We know that cars are problematic, polluting, dangerous and resource depleting - yet we also revere them as beautiful, nostalgic and symbolic objects.
Although partly made to celebrate contemporary consumer surface and form, the works cast doubt on their own righteousness by equating themselves with junk food. As Piccinini states: 'Car Nuggets are to cars what chicken nuggets are to chickens.'
In all of her work, Piccinini is interested in the way that contemporary technology is creating a world where the supposed dichotomy between the artificial and the natural is no longer real or relevant. In
other works she has created baby trucks, mutant designer babies, genetically engineered animals and computer-generated landscapes. With Car Nuggets, she takes a slightly different tack, attempting to synthesise the essence of consumer desire and seduction in the form of the car j stripped of all function. However, she never tries to lecture her audience about what is right and wrong in the world, but rather she explores the ways in which so much of our increasingly hybrid world is simultaneously right and wrong. Piccinini loves her Car Nuggets but acknowledges that their beauty is only as deep as their toxic automotive paint surfaces and hollow fibreglass shells.
Eddie Berg and Jo McConigal
[LESS]Born in Sierre Leone, Patricia Piccinini migrated to Australia as a child. She now lives and works in Melbourne. Her practice has gradually moved from painting towards sculpture, digital photography and video installation.
In recent years, Piccinini has collaborated with professional car modellers and custom painters to make objects out of fibreglass and ABS plastic, each immaculately finished with a lustrous layer of automotive paint. The shapes and surfaces of these works, although abstract, are unmistakably car-like. The artist suggests: 'These are not miniature cars or even bits of cars welded together, they are essence of car; they are lumps of "car-ness"'.
Piccinini uses these bite-size chunks of car to explore the way we are seduced by our everyday interactions with things, despite our understanding of their negative aspects. We know that cars are problematic, polluting, dangerous and resource depleting - yet we also revere them as beautiful, nostalgic and symbolic objects.
Although partly made to celebrate contemporary consumer surface and form, the works cast doubt on their own righteousness by equating themselves with junk food. As Piccinini states: 'Car Nuggets are to cars what chicken nuggets are to chickens.'
In all of her work, Piccinini is interested in the way that contemporary technology is creating a world where the supposed dichotomy between the artificial and the natural is no longer real or relevant. In
other works she has created baby trucks, mutant designer babies, genetically engineered animals and computer-generated landscapes. With Car Nuggets, she takes a slightly different tack, attempting to synthesise the essence of consumer desire and seduction in the form of the car j stripped of all function. However, she never tries to lecture her audience about what is right and wrong in the world, but rather she explores the ways in which so much of our increasingly hybrid world is simultaneously right and wrong. Piccinini loves her Car Nuggets but acknowledges that their beauty is only as deep as their toxic automotive paint surfaces and hollow fibreglass shells.
Eddie Berg and Jo McConigal
