This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Approximate location · 35.280° S, 149.130° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Skywhalepapa is a hot-air balloon carrying a brood of infants against its chest, and it flies.
Patricia Piccinini made it as a companion to Skywhale, the earlier and famously divisive balloon sculpture commissioned for Canberra's centenary. Where the first was a single strange mammalian form with a row of breasts along its flanks, the second is a parent clutching young – and together the two constitute the Skywhale family, which is how the National Gallery of Australia refers to them.
The National Gallery commissioned Skywhalepapa in 2019 and purchased it in 2020, so both works now belong to the national collection and tour as part of it.
That is a genuinely unusual status. These are national-collection artworks that are also aircraft: registered, crewed, weather-dependent, and requiring a licensed balloon pilot to exhibit. A gallery holding a work it can only display when the wind is right is a rare institutional problem.
It also makes them the only entries here with no fixed location at all. Everything else can be visited at an address. The Skywhale family appears where and when it is flown, which is why this record is marked restricted – there is nowhere to go and see it on an ordinary day.
Piccinini's work consistently sits between the tender and the unsettling, and the reaction to Skywhale in 2013 was ferocious. Skywhalepapa arrived to a considerably warmer welcome, which may say more about the intervening years than about the sculpture.
Both balloons also travel, which means they can appear anywhere the National Gallery takes them. The catalogue records them because they are unmistakably giant public objects, while acknowledging that they belong to a collection rather than a place.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Skywhalepapa is Patricia Piccinini's enormous companion hot-air-balloon sculpture to Skywhale. Together the two flying sculptures form the Skywhale family and tour as part of the National Gallery of Australia's national collection.
ACCESS
Mobile flying artwork with no permanent visitor location. Use current event information only; there is no fixed vehicle destination.
