Skywhale

That alone would make it exceptional. What made it notorious was the design: a whale-like creature with ten large mammalian breasts along its flanks, drifting over the national capital. The commission cost drew sustained political criticism, talkback outrage and a great deal of commentary about public money and taste – the most contested piece of public art Australia produced that decade.

Piccinini's work has always been about bodies that are almost familiar. Her sculptures propose creatures that evolution did not make but might have, and Skywhale asks what a whale would look like if it had evolved to fly instead of swim. Read that way the breasts are not provocation but logic: a flying mammal would still nurse its young.

A companion work, Skywhalepapa, followed in 2021, and the two now fly together.

Being in the national collection settles the argument in one direction at least. Whatever the reaction in 2013, the work is now a permanent holding of the country's principal art institution.

Against a catalogue of fibreglass fruit bolted to concrete, an artwork that inflates, ascends, drifts and is then packed into a bag is a genuinely different proposition.

Its dimensions and fabricator are not recorded here.