Ron Mueck: It's big and it's very, very clever

Ron Mueck’s hyper-realist sculptures are both unsettling and exhilarating

The baby is nameless and only hours old — her blood and mucus-smeared body laid out like pork belly on a butcher’s slab. Her umbilical cord is cut but not tied as she stretches out of the foetal position that has restricted her for nine months, feeling her muscles, her arms pushed out at her sides, her fists clenched in defiant independence. Her forehead has the creases of a tiny but hardened worrier — deep furrows that are peculiar to newborns. One nervous eye peeks out from behind an eyelid. She has none of the physical ease that comes with experience, and her senses are being assaulted by the outside world for the first time. What has she arrived into, the poor little thing? Actually, not “little” exactly, for this fledgeling human is a staggering 15ft (4.5m) long.