One of the few continuing events as part of RISING, a new winter arts festival that was largely canceled due to the recent COVID-19 lockdown, Piccinini’s A constantly repeated miracle is a carefully crafted world of creatures, sculptures, installations, videos and sounds. He asks questions central to Piccinini’s work. The artist cultivates harmonious relationships between nature and technology, explores how we often mistakenly align what is conventionally beautiful with what is precious, and demonstrates how positions of power can be tempered through care.

As one of Australia’s greatest artists, Piccinini has been asking these questions for three decades through human and chimerical sculptures, alongside public works such as the Skywhale hot air balloon.

This exhibition is almost a miniature version of the artist’s momentous investigation at the Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art in 2018. Yet Piccinini’s life forms appear more intimate in the seated halls of Flinders Street station among the chipped walls and aging French Renaissance architecture. Piccinini seems to be asking himself: if a space is left to itself, what new forms of life could emerge?

Each of the multiple rooms is its own world: an abandoned office, underwater life, a young man’s room, an inter-species disco. After first encountering the views of Melbourne afforded by space, one is quickly immersed in a rainforest of small hybrid creatures, before moving to a larger room featuring recent works such as a young tree creature held with love on a man’s shoulders and brightly colored silicone stilettos. that turn into plants. Then there is a sculpture that stops almost everyone: two young people holding a laundry basket with an injured koala inside.