Skywhale (Patricia Piccinini)

 

Whaleroad was one of the words Anglo-Saxons used for the sea. It’s a kenning, a sort of picture word common in Norse and Old English poetry; others are day’s-eye (daisy), mind’s-worth (honour), and heaven-candle (the sun).  Ezra Pound uses them in the opening of his Cantos as a way of summoning the ancient form of his adopted language. He also made an excellent translation of ‘The Seafarer’, the Anglo-Saxon poem where whaleroad appears. We find kennings used with happy abandon in the writings of medieval tale-tellers like Tolkien, while modern poets like Seamus Heaney employ them for effect as, for example, when he calls a skeleton a bone-house. Kenning itself is Norse and means to know, recognise; perceive, feel; show; teach. All of those things. These words typify the Anglo-Saxon propensity for riddling.

Whaleroad carries further meanings though. The sea in that culture is a crossing place, not a place for reflection or staying, nor even blessedly, for exploitation. It is wilderness: in Anglo-Saxon ‘deer’ meant any kind of animal, so wild-deer-ness was the place where the wild animals lived, i.e. where humans did not go or stay. They chose the largest creature of the deep to define the sea. Memory of the whale stayed inside the early English psyche, even amongst those who had never seen a whale but knew they existed. By choosing the whale they also pronounced themselves as other from the whale: humans who lived on land.

Skywhale is not a kenning, except in the sense that two vast realities are joined together by two words. Nor is skywhale representative of three-quarters of the Earth’s surface. It is the name of an object and the start of thoughts. When the sculptor Patricia Piccinini wished to design a hot air balloon her interest was to make a sculpture of a living creature rather than a “balloon that looked like something.”  Skywhale looks like something, but not anything we see every day. It stays in the memory, even if you’ve never seen it in the flesh. Piccinini is reported as saying: “My question is what if evolution went a different way and instead of going back into the sea, from which they came originally, they went into the air and we evolved a nature that could fly instead of swim.” The sculpture plays out our life experience of being held by gravity and our own fleshly being to the Earth, while simultaneously being autonomous entities filled with dreams, and the occasional experience, of flight. In this respect, the sculpture represents all such living creatures, but especially conscious humans, in or out of the wild.

Skywhale has an official website. There we find words like these: “Wings didn't make sense to Patricia; the creature was too big and the technical limitations of balloon design wouldn't allow them anyway. So she took a cue from the balloon itself, and imagined that the creature might somehow secrete a lighter than air gas. In the place of wings she imagined huge udders that might contain the gas, as well as a huge bulbous body. She imagined the creature with a slightly more human face, with a calm benign expression that would inspire empathy rather than fear. Her aim was to create a being that was massive and wondrous and that exists somewhere between the impossible and the unlikely.”  All shipshape and Bristol fashion is an Anglo-Saxon double entendre and it makes strange sense when we learn that Skywhale was constructed in that English port city. We notice the sculptor’s deeper purposes in her words. She is in the business of kenning, meaning she is getting us to know, to recognise, to perceive, to feel, to show, to teach.

Skywhale was surprisingly tight-packed when it arrived on trailers at Fitzroy Oval, the original home of the Lions. These Lions stand on two legs and run around the ground kicking to one another a variant of a possum-fur ball. Skywhale in its crinkled wrapped-up state fits inside a large bag. It had to be stretched out across the ground and all the corners unfolded so the air gas could fill the frame and mammary glands. Excited students of Fitzroy Community School had various things explained to them by Patricia Piccinini, that the balloon had to be three degrees warmer than the surrounding air if it was to lift off, that the balloon is thought of as round but is more like a teardrop in shape. It was her natural attention to shape that demonstrated Patricia Piccinini’s intrinsic sculptural thought patterns. Once inflated with cold air everyone was allowed to go inside Skywhale, as long as they had flat sole shoes. The interior is a marvel of beauty and difference too: the school children ran about with glee. But exit they must before the balloon could be fully inflated with hotter air. Slowly Skywhale took on its fully expanded state, body blowing bigger, nipples popping out, “benign expression” of face rising from the grass. The balloon received a mixed response from the school children and locals and commuters moving slowly down Brunswick Street, everything from very amazing to totally amazing to wow awesome to what on Earth is that. Gradually Skywhale gained composure for ascent above Fitzroy, a Melbourne suburb named after the half-brother of the man who commanded the brig-sloop Beagle on its second voyage (1831-36) to Galapagos and elsewhere across the whaleroad.

 

 

 

  

PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN BY BRIDIE HARVEY AND PHILIP HARVEY 

IN NORTH FITZROY ON THURSDAY MORNING THE EIGHTH OF MAY 2014