Eyes as Big as Plates (Finnish: Lautasen Kokoiset Silmät) is a project by Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen, begun in Sandnes, Norway, in 2011, that stages older people within landscapes to examine folklore, aging, and human belonging to nature.
Initially, the artists examined Nordic folklore as a way of understanding how nature becomes character, spirit, or presence. Its title refers to stories of a dog, or sometimes a troll, with eyes as large as plates, a figure that links looking with curiosity, fear, and imagination. From that starting point, Hjorth and Ikonen have expanded the work across seventeen countries on five continents, including Norway, Finland, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Greenland, South Korea, Senegal, the Faroe Islands, and Tasmania. The project asks how people might understand themselves not as separate from the natural world but as part of it. The work also reconsiders aging by presenting seniors as active collaborators, using their stamina, humor, and local knowledge to complicate familiar images of later life. As the series has grown, its scope has widened toward the Anthropocene, interspecies relations, Indigenous land knowledge, and the "age of loneliness," the artists' term for contemporary isolation.
Visually, the portraits place a solitary figure in close relation to a specific terrain. Some images use wide views that measure the body against cliffs, snowfields, bogs, forests, or shorelines; others move closer to faces, hands, and the textures of moss, kelp, branches, clay, flowers, or fish. The subjects wear sculptural forms made from materials gathered on site, so that camouflage, costume, and habitat overlap. Color is central to this merging of person and place: muted skies, wet earth, mineral blues, leaf greens, and seasonal yellows often echo across body and landscape. Natural light, fog, sleet, sun, and cloud shape the mood, producing images that move between staged performance and quiet stillness.
Hjorth and Ikonen work with analogue medium-format cameras, especially the Mamiya 67, and Kodak color film. The weight of the camera, the limited number of exposures, and the absence of studio lighting make each portrait a prolonged encounter rather than a quick sitting. Conversations with participants, walks through chosen places, and the construction of temporary wearable sculptures are part of the process. The materials are usually returned to the site afterward, reinforcing the project’s attention to touch, duration, and local ecology.
Eyes as Big as Plates has circulated through books, exhibitions, public installations, workshops, and performances. The first volume, published in 2017, was shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation First Photobook Award, while the second received a bronze medal at the German Photo Book Award. The work has been shown or collected by institutions including the Barbican Centre, Preus Museum, and Kiasma.
