Patricia Piccinini: Nearly Beloved is the first and only major monograph about her work. In this book Helen McDonald discusses the complex ideas associated with the work of Patricia Piccinini, making both the work and the ideas accessible. Patricia Piccinini’s art brings together technology, popular culture, extinction, ecology, bioethics and the links between humans and animals through genetic engineering, science and medicine. Piccinini takes us on excursions into parallel domains and worlds of charming but unsettling beings: mutant half-human beasts, baby trucks and human scooters. Her installations use silicon, fibreglass, metal, hair, fur and fabric to create illusions of reality in extraordinary detail. She describes her creatures as ‘an alternate world made out of the implications of the real one’.
