Eyes As Big As Plates

This performance is the culmination of a week’s work, during which the Finnish-Norwegian artist duo Riitta Ikonen and Karoline Hjorth have been working with older people from Leeds and West Yorkshire.

Starting out as a play on characters from Nordic folklore in 2011, Eyes as Big as Plates has evolved into a continual search for modern human’s belonging to nature. Inspired by the Romantics’ celebration of imagination, each image in the series presents a solitary figure in a landscape, dressed in elements from surroundings that indicate neither time nor place.

The natural world acts as both content and context in this work, with the characters literally inhabiting the landscape. The production of each image further involves a certain collision of temporality: the fleeting instant of the photographic moment, the more ‘mythic’ time created within the image and the participants’ mental transition as they become one with their wearable sculpture and the surrounding natural landscape.

These performances are free but booking is essential.