Petrina Hicks

Biography

Petrina Hicks has exhibited her work widely through both solo and groups shows in Australia, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, USA, UK, Japan, China, Mexico and Brazil. Recently, her work was selected for the 17th International Videobrasil in Brazil and the Pingyao International Photography Festival in China.

Petrina's works belong to various public and private collections including: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Queensland Art Gallery, Tweed River City Art Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria. She has been awarded various notable prizes and residencies including the Josephine Ulrick Photography Award for Portraiture, ABN Emerging Artist Award (2008), La Cité, Paris Residency, through Art Gallery of New South Wales and an eight month Fellowship with Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany.

For more information, visit Petrina Hicks' website here

Artist Statement

Petrina Hicks' Beautiful Creatures appeals to our senses. Immediately alluring, the large-scale, hyper-real photographs, are all rendered so clearly and with such control they are reminiscent of advertisements. But with a series of little ruptures, within images and between them, Hicks disrupts our usually beguiled response to such artistry. For her, photography's capability to both create and corrupt the process of seduction and consumption is of endless interest.

Hicks loads her images with history and associations but denies us a clear message. Along with the ambiguity, there is a visceral quality in these new works; her depiction of flesh, hair and veins stops the viewer short of being lulled into consumption. Hicks engages a playful yet confronting approach to confound our expectations. A cat, naked without fur, in the image Sphynx, contrasts a beautiful blonde with a face full of it in Comfort. In Emily the Strange the hairless creature reappears with a young girl whose piercing green eyes, skin-pink dress, and latent defiance, make her eerily akin to her pet. Alluded to, in the title of the exhibition, this duality is present in much of the work. Her subjects are not simply beautiful or simply creatures.