Creating this eye, I had no idea what it would look like, nor thought for what it would represent. I simply wanted to created an eye with a million shades of blue. Something sculptural that would be interesting and cool textile art.
I began, as I do with all my designs, with a blank canvas, simple pencil outline. The iris turned unexpectedly, proportionately big but upon my sister's inspection, I came to see its bigness as an excited response to the viewer's gaze. (She also pointed out I had created a smiley in there!)
The varying shades of blues came naturally, intermingling with one another. I was thinking "seas of Belize"; the waters of Greece; anything oceanic. Already, I felt references to the beauty found in nature.
The whites of the eye subtly have the words ame, the french word for soul. (I must have been a Parisian in a former life because I love incorporating this beautiful language in my art.)
All my designs have names and they generally come easy to me. This one, however, did not. I asked my instagram peeps for ideas and was given so many wonderful ideas. None quite fit until my lovely friend Natalie suggested "Emerson." Holy moly! Soooooo perfect!
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about the transparent eyeball in his essay, Nature, published in 1836.
"For Emerson, every object rightly seen unlocks a new faculty of the soul and, while he ardently valorizes the physical eye’s potential to see in a way that discovers symbolic meaning, his most memorable metaphorical image for such potential, the transparent eyeball, posits a vision wherein the eye sloughs off its body and ‘egotism,’ merging with what it sees.
It is within this transparent, disembodied state of total union with nature that Emerson claims 'I become a transparent eye-ball: I am nothing; I see all’. The ‘all’ that Emerson seeks access is not simply harmony with nature or even knowledge, but perception of a deep unity between the human spirit and the natural world." (wikipedia)
My work is greatly influenced by nature: it is an unconscious influence. Without effort, creating the tapestries can be quite meditative and soulful.
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