One of the things that I did on my April 2010 trip to Melbourne was to see an exhibit of the work of sculptor Ron Mueck at the National Gallery of Victoria. One big regret is that I didn't have the 40D with me. I had been planning to see some shows at the Melbourne Comedy Festival later that day and didn't expect to be allowed to have a camera with me, nor did I expect to be allowed into the NGV exhibit with one. So when the doorman said "photography allowed, but no flash" I could not help but internally utter the word "D'OH!!!"

I had the Olympus with me (Edit 2024: This was an ancient Olympus Stylus 720, not the modern Olympus DSLRs or even the pocket sized TG6 that I use today) but unfortunately getting decent hand held shots was close to impossible. It was only later that I noticed that the Olympus was selecting ridiculous ISO settings like 64 on full auto mode. I cranked it up to 800 in manual mode for some later shots but then pretty much ran out of battery.

There were only a dozen or so items in the exhibit, though all were what you'd expect from Mueck; hyper-realistic images on either a gross or minuscule scale, depending on what he wanted to say about his subject.

In this case we see an image of a baby girl, just having been born and with the umbilical cord still attached. (Not visible in this shot, but it can be partially seen in image 0073.) The scale of the sculpture can be judged by the legs of the person standing immediately behind.

I had originally titled this as "It's a Girl!", but according to a book that I later purchased about Mueck's work the correct title is simply "A Girl". However if you do a web search you will find references to a sculpture called "It's A Girl" also dating from 2006... but apparently it is a smaller form of this sculpture attached to a keyring.

I had originally put only one image of this sculpture in the gallery but it's worth seeing a couple of other perspectives as well.

The aforementioned book points out that the subject of infants had been a preoccupation of Mueck, stemming from his time as artist in residence at The National Gallery in London. That gallery is of course full of images of infants (amongst pretty much every other subject) and by 2003 he had created enough sculptures featuring pregnancy and the newborn to hold an exhibition. Interestingly almost all of his infants seem to be oversized, while he tends to sculpt adults (particularly those moving to the end stage of life) in a much smaller scale. However each work needs to be viewed independently. Earlier works may affect later ones (this sculpture, probably the apex of his work on this subject, followed 3 years after the 2003 exhibit, for example), but he has denied that they form a narrative.

Apparently "home" for this sculpture is the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh... meaning that there is very little chance that I'll ever see it again unless it goes on tour. Apparently it is indeed "On Tour" in January 2024 according to the gallery's web site, though I'm not sure where.

The Edinburgh gallery has 4 of Mueck's work including A Girl. The other three are Mask III (this time of an African person's face), Wild Man (which I don't have a decent picture of from this trip; I saw it again in a 2017 exhibit at the Art Gallery of NSW but my one shot there is not safe for work) and Spooning Couple (which I don't think I've seen in the fibreglass as yet). All three are in storage for some reason.