Petrina Hicks: Snakes and Mirrors

Petrina Hicks’s large-scale photographs draw from mythology, fables, and art history to re-frame the contemporary female experience. Permeated with a sense of magical realism, animals and females often appear together to represent aspects of psyche and identity, alluding to the complexity of female identity and the sentience of animals. Central to her work are the porous boundaries between human and animal states, and the affinity of females and animals. 

In ‘Snakes and Mirrors‘, Hicks contemplates the self-awareness of animals and our desire to understand the phenomenology of animal life from a human perspective. Underpinning this series is an exploration of animal consciousness and self-awareness: how do animals experience the universe?

Hicks was moved by Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Eighth Elegy,’ which portrays the mystical relationship between humans and animals and contemplates how humans and animals experience time and phenomena differently. Being unaware of death, the animal looks not backward to the past as man does, but forward into an undivided totality.

Humans perceive time as a linear continuum of past, present, and future; however, for animals, Rilke suggests they exist in a unified, harmonious totality completely different from our worldview. An animal is not conscious of the finite nature of existence with death as the end date. The animal sees the world as a unity: the animal is part of the world, not separated from it as subject and object. 

Within ‘Snakes and Mirrors‘, Hicks challenges the traditional human-centred vision of the world to emphasise the interconnectedness of humans and animals. Serpents, birds, monkeys, and humans bind together, blurring the boundaries between the two in intimate vignettes that propose time in stasis. 

A Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh) touring exhibition. Curator: Anouska Phizacklea, MAPh Director. Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh), City of Monash, Creative Victoria, MAPh Foundation.