SHOCK. Disgust. Fascination and something approaching love. Patricia Piccinini's bizarre, lifelike sculptures can elicit all these emotions when you meet them face to face.

What are we to make of an old woman with a dugong's body sleeping peacefully in the arms of a six-year-old boy? Or a baby with parchment skin and brown eyes the size of cricket balls gazing anxiously from a crib?

"I think they're beautiful," said Piccinini, a Melbourne artist whose exhibition, Related Individuals opens at Sydney's Roslyn Oxley9 gallery tonight. "This show is about our relationship with the stuff we create - and a lot of that stuff is alive."