The Retina – Part IV

Moving from right to left, I was working on filling in all of the empty spaces with the orange beads that represented nuclei of cells in the background. It was taking much longer than I expected, so I decided to take a break at have some fun at this point. While listening to the podcast “Your Creative Push”, I accidentally found out about Plotaverse and got hooked. Here are a few fun videos I created based on my current work in progress pictures.

But then I had to face the music and start deciding where to insert the white jewel in this work. After creating “Hope” and “Lost in Manhattan”, I have decided to continue the theme of hope, as represented by the small white jewel placed just out of view. I played around with a few locations and asked several people for advice, finally settling on the bottom left corner.

It was a bit odd to include an element that was not there in the original scientific image, but at the same time it gave me a sense of ownership of this work.

Once this was done, my mind started racing with all of the possible interpretations of what this might represent. Working with Darcy, we spoke a lot about the “Beholder’s share” and how everyone brings their experience to how they view art. This felt directly relevant to looking deep inside of an eye and seeing that very personal aspect.

People often talk about eyes being the “mirrors into the soul”. Can we use an image of an eye as a metaphor for self-reflection? How do we view ourselves? How do we view the outside world? While I was basing my decision for the location for the “hope” jewel on aesthetics, it occurred to me that it was placed very close to the convergence point of neuronal axons; this is where they exit the eye and enter the optic nerve. Due to the lack of photoreceptors in this area of the retina, it is often referred to as the “blind spot”. When it comes to self-reflection, we are often blind to both our beauty and our flaws, our strengths and our weaknesses. This is where I began to contemplate the title for this work. “Finding Your Self,” deep within, seemed like a good fit.

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