Patricia Piccinini
Born 1965, Sierra Leone 1965; arrived in Australia 1972
Psychotourism,1997
type c print
119.5cm x 250cm
RHS Abbott Bequest Fund, 1997.
Image courtesy of the Artist.
Photographer: Leon Schoots
Visual description:
This is a digital photographic work: a wide horizontal composition with a female figure positioned on the left side. The figure is Australian actress Sophie Lee, impeccably styled in an ambiguously retro yet futuristic way. Her blond hair is styled in smooth rolls and she wears dramatic make up. She is dressed in crisp white tailored jacket and pencil skirt suit, and is holding a small, fleshy creature under her right arm. The creature’s form is two smooth light-skinned lumps with a cartoonish face and a polkadot pink and white baby bow in a tuft of hair. Behind and around her is a digital rocky landscape with a vertiginous drop down to a waterhole or lake. The landscape is rendered in layered, wavy patterns in deep brown, rust, and golden tones, resembling geological strata.
Curator’s insights:
In Patricia Piccinini’s Psychotourism, Australian actress Sophie Lee is the immaculate subject styled in a nostalgic yet futuristic 1960s image. She protectively cradles her LUMP™ (Lifeform with Unevolved Mutant Properties) at the precipice of a steep gorge. A recurring figure in Piccinini’s photographic series of the 1990s, LUMP™ is a genetically-engineered baby with a ‘guaranteed high safety-profile and 100% efficient metabolism, cardio-vascular, neural and immune systems...the choice for parents who really care.’ The crude digital render and vertiginous perspective of the landscape in this image have an unsettling and uncanny effect, resonating with the anxieties raised by ethically-fraught genetic science and increasing disconnection from nature, experienced by many people in the modern world. Across her career, Piccinini has returned often to the theme of maternal love as a model for refocusing our love for nature – in all its unpredictable difference and diversity – a love she sees as essential to the global effort to address the climate crisis.