"Salute to the Sun continues my long fascination with the boundary we draw between the natural and the artificial — and how readily that line dissolves once you look closely."
-Patricia Piccinini
Exhibition Dates: 11 September – 20 September 2026
This new bronze sculpture is a chimera, seamlessly moving between deer, tree, fungus, human and motorcycle. It evolves out of a machine base into an organic form whose arms, or perhaps antlers, unfurl like budding leaves.
The pose comes from the sun salute and from the way plants quietly rotate to face the light. I love that it stands on a beach, an obvious artificial construct, yet entirely at home in that archetypical natural place. Its materiality also reflects this: Bronze is mostly copper, a metal that was laid down in the earth eons ago, but shaped entirely by the manipulation of elemental fire by human activity.
In earlier work I looked at imagining machines with the tenderness, balance and yearning of living things. These machines are the wild creatures of a world where we are all intertwined with technology. Salute to the Sun presents a creature of modern mythology: an hybrid chimera drawing its energy from the sun, more vulnerable than threatening, asking us where we fit into this world.
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