Patricia Piccinini (b. 1965) is an artist best known for her mutant life-like creatures rendered in silicone and her iconic hot-air balloons. Born in Sierra Leone, Piccinini arrived in Australia with her family in 1972, and grew up in Canberra. After graduating in Fine Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts in 1991, Piccinini and a group of artists, including her husband Peter Hennessy, initiated the Basement Project Gallery in Melbourne, which she coordinated until 1996. She and Hennessy have been a collaborative team since then, working out of their studio in Collingwood. Always beginning her creative process with drawing, Piccinini's interdisciplinary practice encompasses sculpture, installation, photography, sound and video. In a 2020 essay 'Some thoughts about my practice', she identified connection, empathy, unnamed emotions, diversity, storytelling, surrealism and wonder as concepts central to her practice. Piccinini's work has been represented in numerous art biennales all over the world, including in Taiwan, Cuba, the UK, Germany and Korea, and her 2003 exhibition We Are Family represented Australia at the 50th Venice Biennale. Commissioned for the 2013 Centenary of Canberra, her hot-air balloon Skywhale was followed by Skywhalepapa in 2021. When Piccinini's solo exhibition ComCiência was exhibited throughout Brazil in 2015–2016, it attracted a record-breaking 1.4 million viewers. A major survey of her work, Curious Affection, was shown at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in 2018. Piccinini's work has appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, and is held in most of Australia's major national and state collections. In 2014 she was awarded the Melbourne Art Foundation Visual Arts Award, and in 2016 an honorary Doctor of Visual and Performing Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts. She was appointed the VCA’s Enterprise Professor in 2017.
