Before causing a sensation at Sensation, the 1997 Royal Academy ex­hib­i­tion that showcased Charles Saatchi's col­lec­tion of work by YBAs, Ron Mueck was a puppet-maker, his career including a long stint at Jim Henson's workshop, home of the Muppets.

Looking at A Girl, a vast sculpture of a newborn baby, traces of his past career remain. For all the me­t­ic­u­lous attention to detail - every vein is de­lin­eated, wisps of hair are matted to the child's head - Mueck does not simply toy with scale, his realist work is touched with the unreal. This holds true of all his giants. There are cartoon-like ex­ag­ger­ated overbites, elongated limbs, enlarged heads and outsized hands ever­y­where. It is not always clear whether this is a function of enlarging the human form, a trick of the eye that needs to be countered by a sculptor to better represent reality, or a stylistic decision on Mueck's part. Either way, Mueck does not, as it first appears, simply play with scale; he plays with pro­por­tion, giving his figures slight symptoms of dwarfism and gigantism, as well as making them small or large.

In the con­tem­por­ary tradition of realistic re­p­res­ent­a­tion of the human form, this puts Mueck closer to the mutant, multi-limbed teens of Jake & Dinos Chapman than the late Duane Hanson's fas­ti­di­ous vignettes. And, while the brothers Chapman seek to shock and Hanson sought to present American everymen and women for ex­am­in­a­tion, Mueck can at times appear to offer little to the viewer but an op­por­tun­ity to admire his skill in re­cre­at­ing flesh in silicone and fibre­glass. This is true of A Girl, and of Mask III, an outsize study of a woman's face. But when Mueck in­tro­duces a hint of narrative, the un­com­fort­able feeling that there is nothing to see but his technical mastery fades.

Wild Man rears back in fear, gripping the chair that supports his vast frame. He is, it seems, terrified by the judgement of the Lil­li­pu­ti­an viewers that surround him, just as a gallery-goer would flee from one of Mueck's little people if it sat up and smiled (a pos­s­ib­il­ity that does not seem all that far-fetched when faced with some of the pieces here). Ghost, too, invites us to furnish an object with a back-story. A lanky ad­oles­cent - iden­ti­fied as female by a wall-label but of in­de­ter­m­in­ate gender - leans against the wall, at two metres only just a giant. Wearing a swimming costume and a trace of a sneer or smirk, this gawky creature must, it seems, have been drowned by someone, someone about to be haunted. In Bed, the largest and most arresting sculpture on show, sees a woman with knees hunched beneath her duvet, one hand resting lightly against her face, her gaze watery, and fixed in the middle distance. And it is im­pos­s­ible not to look into those eyes, the body part Mueck always sculpts last, and mo­ment­ar­ily feel a con­nec­tion. This is some feat on Mueck's part - this deathly still, Brob­dig­n­a­gi­an con­struc­tion does not only elicit an emotional response, it allows, again only mo­ment­ar­ily, the illusion of com­mu­n­ic­a­tion. Uncanny stuff.

More uncanny still are the min­i­atures. Spooning Couple, a half-dressed pair beside each other but barely touching, draws out an in­vol­un­tary shudder. The male figure is so fully realised that it is difficult to inspect him - one tends to inspect, rather than simply look at Mueck's work - and his partner. Man in a Boat is slower to reveal itself. The man in question, cast adrift, looks qu­iz­z­ic­ally into the distance, in­ter­es­ted in his fate, but not overly concerned by it. Though this work is a rare piece of overt symbolism for Mueck, the little ex­ist­en­ti­al­ist's mood is in­fec­tious, leaving little room for con­sid­er­a­tion of that which his plight re­p­res­ents.

And this is where Mueck's work becomes prob­lem­at­ic. On the one hand, Mueck blinds us with his skill. Awe is the only ap­pro­pri­ate response to these sculp­tures - which they are, Mueck does not take casts from real people, unlike Hanson - with their in­di­vi­du­ally drilled pores, sewn hairs and glued eyelashes. On the other hand, he uses his skill to extract an emotional response. However, the latter is a fleeting feeling, and the former is a hollow one. They are powerful reactions, for sure, but they do not last: an hour after seeing one of Mueck's half-real, half-fantastic creatures, one is left only with the sense of having been duped. This might, of course, be seen as a strength rather than a weakness. These are sculp­tures that must be ex­per­i­enced, not seen re­pro­duced in print, on the simple level of their distorted scale, and on the complex level of the response they call forth. That they fade so quickly from the mind does, though, speak of an emptiness at the heart of Mueck's practice.

This review was first published in The Herald in August, 2006.