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.