Rosslynd Piggott I sense you but I cannot see you

Rosslynd Piggott is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists and has received critical acclaim since the early 1980s. With a foundation based in painting, her practice is wide and varied, encompassing drawing, photography, textiles, video, installation and sculpture. Rosslynd Piggott: I sense you but I cannot see you comes twenty-one years after her first survey exhibition, Rosslynd Piggott: Suspended Breath, also held at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1998. 

The exhibition features more than 100 artworks, in varying media, linked by ideas that have sustained Piggott from the beginning of her career, such as dream states and Surrealism, synaesthesia and sensory perception, the beauty of gardens and the natural world and the poetics of space and place. 

A number of important installations are re-created especially for this exhibition, such as Double breath (contained) of the sitter, 1993–94, which draws on items from the NGV’s Collection of decorative arts and fashion and textiles, including nineteenth-century furniture, shoes and garments. The exhibition also features new paintings and a group of engraved glass sculptures that Piggott has made in collaboration with artisans on Murano island, Venice, in recent years. These exquisite works have never been exhibited in Australia before.