Of all the galleries in Australia, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) with its combined art and scientific collections, is best placed to offer such a playground to Patricia Piccinini and guest curator Juliana Engberg. In addition to utilising the temporary exhibition galleries, they were able to persuade the institution to let them into its museum displays to position Piccinini’s work firmly at the nexus of art and science.
The first intervention into the permanent displays was Bottom Feeder (2009), which responded to the theme of environmental degradation in the diorama where taxidermic sea birds sit amongst rubbish washed up on shore. Bottom Feeder is a propositional creature, a genetically engineered ‘what if’ designed to eat the waste encumbering its neighbours. Next door, in an exhibition dedicated to the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the bronze skulls of two more of Piccinini’s fictitious animals were slotted into a display case, as a neat summation of the thesis behind the exhibition’s title.
Another provocative redeployment of the gallery’s resources was to hand the attendants small sculptures, each called The Offering (2009), and ask them to encourage the public to touch these almost human dozing babies. Visitors were consequently drawn into a relationship with one of the creatures, rather than just passively observing the relationships within the artist’s works. It also provided a point of access for those who were unfamiliar with the work or confronted by it, and gave them an opportunity to ask questions, enriching their experience of the exhibition.
With the exception of Bodyguard (for the Golden Helmeted Honeyeater) (2004)—the first of Piccinini’s ‘caretaker’ series, intended to protect the endangered Gold Helmeted Honeyeater—and the beautiful