For this daybreak outing, journalists were borne aloft in a conventional hot-air balloon to track the thirty-four-metre-long mammalian hybrid with its ten dangling udders and cartoon-like turtle face. We were told that Skywhale represented maternal love and nurturing. However, the chase brought to mind Captain Ahab’s pursuit of Moby-Dick, or, more appositely given the artists’ obsession with the monsters we create and the monsters within us, Victor Frankenstein’s hunt for his misunderstood, lumbering creation across the Arctic wastes (it was a very cold morning).

Patricia Piccinini's hot air balloon Skywhale (photograph by TarraWarra Museum)

Piccinini’s debt to Mary Shelley’s tale of scientific meddling in creation is overt. Less obvious is the influence of Joy Hester, but it forms the rationale for the exhibition Patricia Piccinini & Joy Hester, Through Love ... at the Yarra Valley’s Tarrawarra Museum of Art. The theme of love, in a variety of iterations, drives this show, which is curated by Tarrawarra’s director, Victoria Lynn.

Piccinini cites Hester’s portrayal of strong emotions as an early and enduring influence. In both artists’ practices, figures merge and entwine, and themes of identity and individuation are persistent ones in their work.

Joy Hester and Patricia Piccinini are not obvious bedfellows; Hester (1920–60) is a long-neglected member of the mid-century Angry Penguins art group, with a body of work on paper that centres on emotionally charged relationships; Piccinini (born in 1965) is famous for her imaginary, life-like hybrid creatures and for her explorations of genetic engineering, organ harvesting, and the exploitative relationship between humans and animals. As with Hester, the emotional charge is electric, but whereas Hester’s lovers and loves concentrate on a powerful interior world, Piccinini’s work is didactic. There are twenty-two paintings by Hester, thirty-six sculptures and drawings by Piccinini, with an emphasis on the latter’s three-dimensional creations.

Joy Hester, Lovers [II], 1956. Brush and ink and watercolour on paper, 75.3 x 55.5 cm. National Gallery of Australia, purchased 1973 (© Joy Hester/Copyright Agency, 2018)

Although they make a quieter contribution, it’s a pleasure to see Hester’s modestly sized paintings at Tarrawarra; they grow in stature away from the sometimes cloying context of art patrons John and Sunday Reed and the Heide circle with which she is famously associated.

During her short life – she died at the age of forty after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in her twenties – Hester’s talent was seen as slight. It was overshadowed by that of her first husband and fellow Angry Penguin, Albert Tucker, and others in the circle, including Sidney Nolan and Danila Vassilieff. There was also an element of misogyny in criticism of her work; the critic for The Sun, Alan Warren, wrote of one exhibition that it consisted of ‘a variety of feminine images (full of mannerisms, based on nothing more than a habit of letting the brush run away with her) about which I find it difficult to be encouraging’.

Hester’s use of materials, Chinese inks, and pastels on paper also relegated her to a lower rung than works in oil on canvas, media which, to the half-educated locals and critics, represented the acme of serious, masculine art. It was not until twenty years after her death that her work began to be reappraised.

Joy Hester, Love, 1949. Chinese ink and pastel on paper, 29.5 x 24.5 cm. Private collection (© Joy Hester/Copyright Agency, 2018)

Two series are on show, ‘Love’ (1949) and ‘The Lovers’, from the mid-1950s. The latter explores both her relationship with artist Gray Smith, with whom she lived for the last decade of her life, and the maternal bond with the two children she had with him, against medical advice (her first child, Sweeney, was adopted by the Reeds). Both series are intensely concerned with relationships and identity. Figures merge, often sharing an eye, a mouth. Separation is always hovering in the desperate clinging. The denseness of the black ink, the powerful looseness in her brushstrokes, and the extraordinary expressiveness of these faces, especially the eyes, whether pleading, ecstatic, savage, weary, or anxious, mark her out as a highly distinctive artist and explorer of modernism.

Some of Piccinini’s best-known works are on shown here, including The Young Family (2002). A porcine/human hybrid suckles her offspring, the mother’s expression conveying both love and abject misery. Her babies, we are told, have been bred for human use.

Patricia Piccinini, The Young Family, 2002. Silicone, fibreglass, leather, human hair, plywood, 85 x 150 x 120 cm approx. Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria RHS Abbott Bequest Fund, 2003 (Courtesy the artist , Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney)

Kindred 2018, another creation of incredible realism made from hair, fibreglass, and silicone, shows a hirsute female with hints of orangutan, carrying her two cute simian offspring (children feature in most of Piccinini’s works). This mother, too, wears a look of noble suffering. The strangeness of these humanoids is meant to excite pity and love, but there’s the potential for a more carnivalesque, freak-show response too.

All of Piccinini’s work carries strong messages; stop endangering the environments of endangered species, stop experiments in mutation and genetic engineering, stop experiments with organ transplants involving animals bred for the purpose; learn to love the marginal, those possessing otherliness and all creatures who don’t conform to a nature ideal of beauty.

Patricia Piccinini, Kindred, 2018. Silicone, fibreglass, hair, 103 x 95 x 128 cm. The Michael and Janet Buxton Collection, Melbourne (Courtesy the artist, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney)

Empathy is demanded, but art that tells you what to feel invites rebellion. Disquiet or revolt against the treatment of animals, and empathy for the outsider, can spring from a rational source as readily as from an emotional one. If those sculptures had beady eyes instead of meltingly plangent ones, I might feel less manipulated.

More kitschy, but also more humorous, are Piccinini’s zoomorphic scooters. In The Lovers (2011), two slumped and canoodling mopeds sprout bristling antlers in the form of wing mirrors. They seem absorbed in each other, in a similar way to the lovers in Hester’s paintings. We do not feel a need to save these vehicles, merely to savour them.

Patricia Piccinini, The Lovers, 2011. TarraWarra Museum of Art, 2018. Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide Roy and Marjory Edwards. Bequest Fund with the assistance of Colin and Robyn Cowan through the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation, 2011. Courtesy the artist, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney (photogtaph by Rick Liston)

As with all shows at Tarrawarra, the work is impeccably displayed and lit. Whilst pairing these two artists together doesn’t produce a dialogue, as the best couplings should, it does throw up questions about the many forms of love, the value we place on them, and the way love is gendered.

Patricia Piccinini and Joy Hester, Through Love continues at the Tarrawarra Museum of Art until 11 March 2019.

ABR Arts is generously supported by The Copyright Agency's Cultural Fund and the ABR Patrons.