Jeni Danks with her three-metre-wide white fibreglass chimp head at the family's Mornington Peninsula property.
Jeni Danks with her three-metre-wide white fibreglass chimp head at the family's Mornington Peninsula property. Photo: Wayne Taylor

SCULPTURE is hot right now: from hyper-real people to hybrid creatures to sad and serene chimpanzees, everyone from tradies to doctors and lawyers wants a piece of the art action that provides a human connection.

On her living room shelf, Prahran graphic designer Jane Kleimeyer keeps a bronze bust made by Ormond sculptor Lisa Roet from the death mask of a chimpanzee that had died in a zoo. She also bought a pair of $3000 chimp hands sculpted by Roet.

''I encourage people to touch them,'' says Kleimeyer. ''You can feel how closely they are related to us. But they also have some sort of sadness about them.''

On their Mornington Peninsula property, 40 kilometres south of Melbourne, the Danks family has a three metre-wide white fibreglass Roet chimp head facing towards their house away from Port Phillip Bay. Peter Danks gave his wife the chimp as a present for her 44th birthday.

 
''When we first got him, my children used to pick flowers and plants and put them in front of him as an offering of food,'' says Jeni Danks, laughing. ''That's how realistic he is.'' Initially, some visitors thought it ''odd'', having an ape in the garden; ''now we have so many people that draw similarities between human friends and him''.

Roet's collectors include Malcolm and Lucy Turnbull, Transfield boss Luca-Belgiorno Nettis and the co-founder of the annual Primavera exhibition for young artists, Sydney philanthropist Cynthia Jackson.

Jackson has a small Roet baby chimpanzee sculpture she keeps on sculpted chimp hands. ''I just love that I could hold that baby chimpanzee in my hands too,'' says Jackson.

Coburg sculptor Sam Jinks' ''hyper-real'' sculptures of nude humans - from newborn babies to a frail man apparently dying in his son's arms to a man with a dog's head - also elicit a deep emotional response.

Sydney gastroenterologist Clinton Ng has no children but keeps a large $40,000 silicone baby made by Jinks in his spare room, next to a crate containing a ''litter'' of baby human-animal creatures sculpted by Patricia Piccinini, for whom Jinks used to work as a technician.

Jinks' sculpted boy - partly modelled on the artist's son, Leo, who's now eight - has a forehead birthmark and real human hair. ''I like that quite fine detail, the very accurate anatomy,'' says Dr Ng. ''I've thought about putting him in my clinic, but I'm not an obstetrician or a paediatrician,'' he laughs, ''so I don't think it'd be that appropriate.''

One of India's big contemporary art collectors, Kiran Nadar, bought a Jinks sculpture at the India Art Fair earlier this year, Small Things - a baby surrounded by frogs - but it was the media attention that was extraordinary: images of Jinks' works at the fair appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, The Daily Mail and many Indian papers.

Jinks fits into the ''hyper-real'' mould of Piccinini and Melbourne-born, now London-based sculptor Ron Mueck, another Jinks mentor.

When the Shepparton Art Museum temporarily put Jinks' sculpture Woman and Child on display, the local community was ''blown away'', says spokeswoman Amina Barolli. Ordinary people flocked to the museum, returning to see the sculpture of an old woman holding the baby. The gallery was overwhelmed by 17,000 visitors in 10 weeks.

Jinks said that he'd originally intended the old woman (based partly on his mother and his mother's friend) and the baby (based partly on his daughter Hazel, now 2) to be one and the same person at both ends of life.

So moved was the Shepparton community that ordinary people pitched in about $12,000 of the $75,000 price tag, helping the gallery buy the sculpture. Residents of the town put their own interpretations on the work.

''I think when people saw it they were projecting themselves onto it - their mother or their children,'' says Jinks. ''It had a life of its own in the end because people tended to project their own family, which is nice because it keeps doing its thing beyond me.''