Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf-Bear-Human?

By Sammi Gale

‘The best part is that is NOT AI!’ reads a comment on a video of Patricia Piccinini’s ten-human-breasted Skywhale (2013) hot air balloon taking flight. As recently as 2021 when its sculptural mate, Skywhalepapa, joined the family, the Uncanny Valley was an abstract concept reserved for roboticists and philosophers: now, of course, we live in its troughs. A few taps of a keyboard and anyone can conjure the kind of hyperrealistic chimera that the artist has spent decades labouring toward in silicone, fibreglass and human hair. 

Reading like the accidental artefacts of a generative model but carrying the lived-with-ness of labour, time and intention, the human-animal hybrids in Piccinini’s exhibition Holding Tight and Letting Go at Ames Yavuz, London, manage to feel novel at a moment of synthetic-image fatigue – even though the sculptures are themselves synthetic constructs. I know they do not get up and walk around when the gallery shuts for the night. Right? Right??

"like an anti-xenophobia"

I'll be honest: when I first saw Piccinini's work, I dismissed it as gross-out gimmickry. It was a friend's description of her whale balloons — offered with a warmth and genuine fondness I hadn't expected — that made me look again, and visit them in the flesh. At Madame Tussaud’s by way of Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory; no, at Ames Yavuz in Mayfair, a tiny donkey-person sits on a plinth, pixie-proportioned, with a wispy wave of ginger hair running down its spine, blue veins visible beneath sun-flushed skin, a freckled shoulder. He’s called The Pacifist (2023), and with tiny hoofs for hands he’d have a hard time hurting anyone. The hoofs are unromantically realised, nicotine-stain-coloured, too-too-thick nails, a reminder that horses’ hoofs and human nails are both made from keratin, that we ain’t so different after all. Nawww, freaky little guy. 

That is exactly the shift Piccinini solicits, and she has named it: ‘What I would love is for people to feel an emotion that we don't even have a name for: a feeling of warming to something that you initially found disconcerting or unpleasant or challenging … like an anti-xenophobia.’ The six works in Holding Tight and Letting Go are in the business of producing exactly that. 

Having initially rejected it outright – and still partially suspicious that I’m being punked by the Doctor Who props team – I find myself asking what more I could want art to do. Perhaps one of the better effects it can produce is empathy where it doesn’t naturally arise. Rarely, though, is that process as direct as it is here. At an historical moment of rising xenophobia, the way that hostility modulates through to tenderness by the time you’ve idly wandered 135° round a sculpture on a plinth may take viewers aback with its apparent simplicity. 

"there is a whiff of the Victorian about this work – perhaps it is formaldehyde"

Another thing we often ask of art is to produce a sense of beauty. Piccinini is beloved (she was ranked the world’s most popular contemporary artist in 2016, according to The Art Newspaper’s annual attendance rankings) yet these works are decidedly ugly even for a time when ugliness is en vogue – way, way beyond tabis and bleached eyebrows. In fact, they strike me as aesthetically unfashionable as well as grotesque, in the spirit of the 1980s superrealist works of Duane Hanson, or Ian McEwan’s fascination with blending art and science. Yet, these works are assured, even as they chart a path that feels curiously out of step with their times. At the risk of sounding like One Direction – that is what makes them attractive.

The striped-tailed figures of While She Sleeps (2021) recall the extinct thylacine (or Tasmanian tiger) and contemporary attempts to reconstruct it through CRISPR-based genome editing. If successful, scientists will produce a living chimera not unlike the speculative bodies Piccinini imagines. The pair cut the same silhouette as those in Thomas Kennington’s Homeless (1890), where a washerwoman tends to a collapsed boy, but Piccinini’s creature looks up, alert; vulnerable. Certainly, there is a whiff of the Victorian about this work – perhaps it is formaldehyde – as if these sculptures are specimens lifted from a macabre cabinet of curiosities. Contrary to the usual unspoken social norms of gallery-going, you feel, slightly, as though you are not meant to stare too long.

"the soft skin, the rounded proportions, the realistic eyes — something reads as dependent, as requiring care, before reason can intervene"

It’s true that I might be especially primed to enjoy Piccinini’s work having recently become a father. The experience has made me feel more animal than ever, but also more protective and therefore perhaps less tolerant than I might like to admit – certainly more likely to flinch on the busy highstreet near where we live and clutch my baby tighter when we walk past the weird people who hang out by the weird Costa. I used to wonder how birds on an island could locate their own chicks among thousands of others; then I was standing in a maternity ward and I knew immediately, without looking, which cry was my child's. The instinct was just there. Piccinini's figures trigger something not unlike it: the soft skin, the rounded proportions, the realistic eyes — something reads as dependent, as requiring care, before reason can intervene.

Then again, the question of children seems to linger over the exhibition itself. It is there in the babylike scale of The Pacifist and The Stalwart (2026), a slab of flesh with the cute brachycephalic nose of a bulldog and smiling eyes (even despite its faintly Trumpian blond combover). The Rescuers (2021) are children, two girls carrying a koala with its legs in casts in a washing basket. The Couple (2018) was first shown in a caravan, as if the two figures interlocked peacefully in bed – their prognathous midfaces and broad, flattened noses recalling a bear's muzzle – were parked up by the side of a road somewhere, perhaps on the run. Here, their bed is made of shipping pallets, which lends the scene the same sense of provisionality. Viewed at shin-height, they appear all the more exposed.

The male figure appears to be asleep, the woman pensive. Their long hair pools on the pristine white pillows. You’d cut to this scene in a film to imply the afterglow of sex. I found myself looking at the woman’s belly to see if she could be pregnant, the bedsheet finishing just above where her belly button would be. As such, the work brushes up against anxieties as old as storytelling itself: miscegenation, bestiality, contamination, the threat posed by the outsider. Yet the woman’s hand touched to the man’s cheek, even with its long nail-claws, is all too human.

We live amid an endless circulation of cute animals: cats, dogs and rescued wildlife flattened into swipeable content, endlessly reassuring us that nature is still on our side. Piccinini’s work refuses that comfort. It drags those impulses back toward something stranger and less easily consumed – where fear and care are not opposites but adjacent responses. Holding Tight and Letting Go suggests that compassion may begin precisely at the point where instinct tells us to recoil – and that what we call monstrous might simply be the moment before recognition.