Karoline & Riitta

Photo: Jennifer Houdrouge

Riitta Ikonen & Karoline Hjorth have collaborated since 2011 on publications and projects including Eyes as Big as Plates (ongoing), The World in London (2012), Time is a ship that never casts anchor (2014–18), Signal, Lights, Connected for the PyeongChang Winter Olympics (2018), TEDMED Talk 2020, and Finnskogen Understories (ongoing). Finnish artist Riitta Ikonen received her MA from the Royal College of Art in 2008. Norwegian photographer, artist and writer Karoline Hjorth received her MA from the University of Westminster (London) in 2009.

The ongoing photography series Eyes as Big as Plates started out in 2011 studying personifications of nature and folkloric explanations of natural phenomena. A decade later it has evolved into a continual search for modern human’s belonging in nature, taking the Norwegian-Finnish artist duo Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen to fifteen countries on a quest to understand our relationship with our surroundings. The series features portraits produced in collaboration with retired wrestling coaches, fishermen, zoologists, plumbers, opera singers, housewives, pub patrons, Sami reindeer herders, Aboriginal uncles, kantele players, librarians, wild boar hunters, and surfers across four continents.

Part sculpture, part installation and part photography, Ikonen and Hjorth work together from beginning to the end of the process with their different complementing skills. As the project continues to cross borders, it also aims to rediscover a demographic group too often labeled as marginalized, and to generate new perspectives on who we are and where we belong. By exploring the possibilities that lie in the potential of art to propel actionable system changes, the project continues to cross cultural and geographical borders, with the thematic horizon opening up towards ideas connected to the increasingly multispecies desynchronisation that is currently unfolding across ecosystems and communities.

Shop art from Karoline & Riitta

Museum Collections

Preus National Museum of Photography, Horten, Norway (2021), KORO Public Art Norway (2020/17), Oslo City Council, Norway (2020), Grue Council, Norway (2020), Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, Tasmania (2019), Finnmark Hospital Trust, Norway (2018), Michael Gibson Gallery, Toronto, Canada (2016), Art Kapsule, NYC (2015), Museo Nacional de la Fotografía de Colombia (2015), Recess Art, NYC & Art Assets (NYC 2015), Art in the Workplace, Ministry of Education and Research, Norway and Drammen City Council, Norway (2014), Trondheim City Council (2013), Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2012), in addition to private collections worldwide.

Press

The series has been covered widely in the press, including TED.com / TEDMED (August 2020), CNN, Artsy, The Huffington Post, BBC, Deutsche Welle, TIME LightBox, Libération, La Repubblica, Artlink Australia, Life Magazine (Hong Kong), Conveyor Art magazine, Philosophie (FR), The Weekender (DE), Internazionale (IT), NRK (NO), Helsinki Times (FI), amongst others.

Publications

The first book in the series, Eyes as Big as Plates, was nominated for Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards 2017 in the category 'First Photobook' and won the prize for the best cover in Norway. It was also the winner of the British Society of Gerontology's Photocrowd award in early 2016 as well as the Nordic Crowdfunding Alliance’s ‘The Best Norwegian Crowdfunding Campaign’ in the Culture and Arts category for 2016. Eyes as Big as Plates 2 is set to be released by the end of 2021 in conjunction with the project’s ten-year anniversary. The sequel will feature sixty brand new works and field notes made over the last four years in South Korea, Tasmania, Outer Hebrides, Senegal, Iceland, Greenland and Norway.