Eyes as Big as Plates

“We need to learn to see not just with Western eyes but with Islamic eyes and Inuit eyes, not just with human eyes but with golden-cheeked warbler eyes, coho salmon eyes, and polar bear eyes, and not even just with eyes at all but with the wild, barely articulate being of clouds and seas and rocks and trees and stars.”  Roy Scranton

"Eyes as Big as Plates" is a project launched by Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen. It began as "a play on characters from Nordic folklore" searching ways how modern humans belong to nature. People participating are fishermen, opera singers, artists, farmers, academics... In 2011, the artist duo started portraying seniors in Norway, Finland, France, UK, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Sweden, Japan, Greenland, the Czech Republic, the US and South Korea. The photographs show them wearing sculptures they create symbolising how they inhabit the landscape (via).

"As active participants in our contemporary society, these seniors encourage the rediscovery of a demographic group too often labelled as marginalized or even as a stereotypical cliché. It is in this light that the project aims to generate new perspectives on who we are and where we belong." (via)

photographs by Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonnen via