Elizabeth Pearce: 25 years ago, when you first went to art school, what did you think you were getting yourself into? Did you have a clear objective?

Patricia Piccinini: Twenty-five years ago I thought that I was going to drink red wine and have a studio and walk around with flowing dresses on with a canvas under my arm.

So the Skywhale has gone viral. (Let’s all say it together now: hashtag Skywhale! Yet again, the Twittersphere has doled out some sort of bastardised and populist cultural legitimacy, in a move that is equally liberating and terrifying. I don’t understand Twitter. For me, it’s in the same category as Sydney, Bob Katter and quinoa.)

It’s the interiority of it. The quietness. Like being underwater. But I think that’s its intention (one of them, at least). With The Subjectivisation of Repetition, Yves Netzhammer cuts together this mesh of vignettes, these lyrical short scenes that shrug off conventional ways of meaning to instead offer an internal panorama of a human mind. Whether this mind is intensely personal or inclusively collective, I’m not sure.

I was halfway through Middlemarch when I got (‘fell’) pregnant. I’m not suggesting there’s a connection. I have only just been able to pick the book up again, and when I say ‘pick the book up’ that is not a metaphor (or metonymy) for reading it; I literally have been unable to look at it or touch the cover due to the powerful association I have built between it, and the all-day, all pervasive morning sickness that promptly followed my ‘falling’ and that, frustratingly, led to no actual vomiting, meaning that it wasn’t even classed as bad in the scale of things.