Patricia Piccinini: 'I wanted to make this sincere celebration of the blobfish'
Australian sculptor Patricia Piccinini at the Festival Gallery, at Galway International Arts Festival. Picture:Andrew Downes
It’s no great surprise that Patricia Piccinini has been asked back to Galway International Arts Festival. The Australian artist’s new exhibition, We Travel Together, comes nine years after her first outing at the festival. On that occasion, Piccinini presented an exhibition of sculptures called Relativity, along with Skywhale, a balloon artwork - 100 feet long and 70 feet tall - that hung in the sky over Galway for a whole week.
Skywhale is extraordinary. It has the head of a turtle, a bulbous body and ten udders, and weighs half a ton. The work was commissioned by the city of Canberra, Australia to mark its centenary in 2013, and was made – to Piccinini’s design – by Cameron Balloons in Bristol, at a cost of $300,000. It is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia.
