The first time I became truly fascinated by eyes was when I saw a photograph of an iris close-up. I can’t remember the photographer who first did this, but they completely blew my mind.

Incidentally, nowadays there are studios set up for this specific purpose selling them as tokenistic gifts - yet another fad - but at least it comes from something inherently beautiful.

The irises looked like landscapes. The pupil, the crater of a volcano. And around the volcano, an entire world. Oceans and hills and feeling, entirely organically created inside a little white ball. Housed inside our heads. The portals for one of our (or at least most people’s) most important senses. Our ability to see the world around us and, of course, our physical selves.

Faces are part of the puzzle too - whether they are complete or part, they further represent a feeling. When I’m deep into the feeling, I find I’m almost inside the eye. When I have more perspective of myself, I can draw an entire face. Either way, the eyes that stare back at me speak to my self-regard:

They say, “I see you.”

The interplay between eye and ‘I’ intrigues me. Who am I? Am I the eye that sees or the I that sees the eye? What does it take to express the ‘I’? Sometimes nothing more than a single scratch on the page. A long line, yes, that is the ‘I’ or is it the “eye”? The eye that observes all. Is there an eye that sees all? A God-like eye that is housed in every single atom, every particle of everything, staring back at each other?

Because without an eye to say “yes, you exist” - how do we really know we’re here?

Without my fellow human beings noticing me? A dog coming up to me in the street because it “sees” me. How do I know I really exist?

I don’t. And dissociation is something I’m prone to. So, these eyes mean more than I could ever explain.

Perhaps there’s some truth to the ‘Evil Eye’ to “ward off bad spirits” as they say. It brings awareness to things that might otherwise be shrouded in darkness. And when we look at those ‘dark’ parts of ourselves, and bring them into the light - they’re never quite as scary as we first thought. Because they have shifted from something of the imagination to something of reality. And reality must always be a subset of the imagination. Or is it? Perhaps it’s terrifying in its own right. But at least it has form. And form is something we can identify and, at the very least, pretend to understand! ;)