The Danish visual artist Ida Hermansen invites us on an artistic journey where she explores how plastic visually takes shape, leaves its imprint, and helps create new existences. Through the exhibition, Ida Hermansen offers her perspective on the current climate crisis and our shared responsibility for our blue planet.
We humans are the source of enormous amounts of plastic waste, and the material is often seen as a reflection of our thoughtless actions and the responsibilities we fail to take seriously. Plastic is a flexible material that we encounter many times throughout our daily lives, and none of us can avoid dealing with it. The exhibition’s title, Eternal, reflects everything that plastic is to us. We have it in endless quantities, yet it is also indestructible and eternal in the sense that we have become dependent on it. Where would we be without plastic?
Ida Hermansen’s exhibition should be seen as a call for reflection and a reminder of the consequences we set in motion with every action we take.
In Eternal, two different series of works are presented, each visually engaging with the forms of plastic waste we consume and discard, both locally and across the wider world
The photo series Echoes of the Unseen showcases a number of works where it is impossible to decode what has been created by nature and what has been left behind by humans. In connection with the exhibition, Ida Hermansen conducted fieldwork at Hillerød Forsyning. Here, she was inspired to challenge our perception of how we visually and sensorially encounter plastic. In the series Echoes of the Unseen, the boundaries between the natural and the artificial are blurred. Is it a drop, a wave, or a plastic bag?
The exhibition also features the photo series Autotrophs, which, with its deep and vibrant blue color, stands out vividly amidst the diverse expressions of the Vandrehallen. In these works, Ida focuses on the most insignificant form of plastic – the plastic bag at the end of the checkout belt. Our overconsumption of plastic has slowly merged with the rhythm of the ocean, and Ida shows in her works how plastic drifts with the current and integrates itself into the natural beauty of the oceans.
Bacillus timepoint
The Bacillus Timepoint series is a collaboration between Ida Hermansen and microbiologist and PhD Bodil Kjeldgaard at Reshape Biotech. Ida Hermansen has painted with the bacterium Bacillus in Bodil Kjeldgaard's laboratory at Reshape Biotech. Most often described as a soil bacterium, Bacillus is found everywhere in nature in every region on Earth, in spices and in the intestinal flora. It has recently been discovered that Bacillus releases a number of signaling substances to its surroundings - small molecules that the bacteria use to communicate with each other - e.g. that there is no room for more individuals in a bacterial colony. In this way, Bacillus can enter and interfere with signals from e.g. staphylococci; the bacteria communicate and compete with each other constantly. The yellow spot in the picture is a 'pollution' - from Ida Hermansen, who accidentally got something from herself onto the medium while working with the works. Reshape's robots can photograph in timelapse, so Bacillus has been photographed from the very first signs of activity.
Early in the history of life, autotrophic organisms emerged, utilizing the chemical energy from oxygen-poor carbon or sulfur compounds to synthesize the necessary sugars to sustain themselves.
The series 'Autotrophs' revolves around this phenomenon and presents a sci-fi narrative exploring what the nascent beginnings might look like if the plastic floating in the oceans were to acquire its own matter and energy to create and sustain its own life. Becoming self-sustaining and giving rise to new life, much like the first life forms on Earth. Images of future living organisms. Brought to life via sunlight.
Early in the history of life, autotrophic organisms emerged, utilizing the chemical energy from oxygen-poor carbon or sulfur compounds to synthesize the necessary sugars to sustain themselves.
The series 'Autotrophs' revolves around this phenomenon and presents a sci-fi narrative exploring what the nascent beginnings might look like if the plastic floating in the oceans were to acquire its own matter and energy to create and sustain its own life. Becoming self-sustaining and giving rise to new life, much like the first life forms on Earth. Images of future living organisms. Brought to life via sunlight.
For over 100 years, the machine has been celebrated and worshiped as an object that produces dreams, enthusiasm and awe. Western art and literature have gone back and forth between worship in the 1920s and 30s, to criticism in the 1960s and 1970s, to a hybrid situation today, where the culture simultaneously worships, challenges, consumes and seeks meaning through the machine and especially digital technology. With her works, Ida Hermansen challenges the assumption of the contradictory relationship between technology and nature and takes as a starting point the concept of Technê-Zen, which originates from Robert Pirsig's philosophical short story 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'. A hypothesis that is about living in harmony with nature and technology, as illustrated in Richard Brautigan's poem 'All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace' from 1967. The true ugliness is not in the machine itself, but in our relationship with it. The works consist of digital and analogue photographs, brought together, layered upon layer, driven by the medium and at the same time liberated. A digital imprint of man-made objects, inspired by nature and expressed through technology - therein lies the harmony. Some works appear almost as if they were taken out of the future space of utopia.
