Intrusive Eyes

This piece represents my fear of what I call intrusive eyes. I often find myself afraid and frustrated with the sexualized and objectified gaze from passersbys, amounting to a growing fear of being myself out in the world. Sometimes I wish I could remove my appearance and body from my mind to fully see the world. I created this work using acrylic paint on a wood panel, painting in layers. The first layer is the background, my sea of eyes that I cannot escape. On top of this are bubbles filled with my body parts often objectified, trapped, and floating in an ocean of onlookers. In this frustration with intrusive eyes, I sometimes develop insecurity, wondering how I could look “better”. I found this insecurity seeping into the process itself, finding difficulty in painting my body parts to look “right”. This work encapsulates what many women struggle with daily, a contemplation of what it means to have a body, forced to be watched.