text by Jane Rowley

Linda Hansen has won numerous awards for her portraits – of people. In Life in Plastic she shifts focus to the animal kingdom, creating an entire menagerie of loved and familiar creatures. But despite their lifelike appearance, the images blown-up here are actually headshots of diminutive plastic figures – small enough to be held in the hand of a child. Closer examination reveals the thin plastic joins on a budgie’s beak, the chipped paint and cracked plastic of a missing ear, and the paint worn thin on an apparently soft yet brittle muzzle.

Hansen transfers her skills in portraiture to this world of plastic miniatures, constructing a tailor-made mini studio complete with backdrop. Then, just as with the humans she photographs, she zooms in for the close-up – shifting angle, directing and moving her inanimate subjects to capture their personality – and their direct gaze. 

It is this gaze which makes the inhabitants of this artificial world so strangely familiar. With consummate skill Hansen injects life into these mass-produced toys, capturing their expressions and giving them the capacity to move us. Chipped and bruised by wear and tear, Hansen reveals these war-wounded of the playroom to us anew. 

Figures normally unseen by the adult eye, as they are hurriedly swept off the floor into toy-boxes or hastily gift-wrapped for children’s birthdays, are revealed as the creations they are, allowing us to appreciate the skill and detail of perception that has gone into their making. A haughty camel sneering down at us, a heart-rending chimp whose protruding lower lips seems to tremble and whose eyes look wet with tears, and an angry battered pig, who definitely looks as if someone had trod on its totters. An apt choice the artist’s native country of mass-produced Danish bacon.

Because Hansen’s project, as the title of the series Life in Plastic reveals, is broader in scope. The animals she renders so lovingly become symbols of an increasingly inhospitable planet, a planet in which the sad chimp is pinned to the vivisectionist’s operating table, the factory-farmed pig is injected with antibiotics to combat the open sores inflicted by its crazed cellmates, and the wounded giraffe looks at us in bewilderment from a treeless world.

In this context of global destruction Life in Plastic could be seen as a photographic Noah’s Arc. Yet here there are no pairs. Each and every figure is rendered totally individually.
And looking at you.