"Eye for an Eye" has sort of a double meaning for me. I went into this imagery with the intention of portraying how helpless I felt when all around me was hate. I could only sit and watch as it happened to not only me, but to the other "queer" kids with whom I had joined an alliance of sorts. At the time, I was festering with hatred, and it felt like I was truly rotting from the inside.
As I explored the imagery further, I was inspired by the tale of Odin, the Norse god of wisdom, and how he gained that wisdom through a rather gruesome exchange with the deity Mimir. According to legend, Odin gouges out his own eye as means of payment for the deity Mimir, who asked what he was willing to sacrifice in order to drink from his well, where the water was said to give anyone who drinks from it the gift of infinite knowledge. Mimir agrees after the eye is tossed at his feet, and offers Odin a drink from a hollowed out horn.
The act of sacrificing one's own organ responsible for physical sight to gain cosmic perspective, or infinite hindsight, some say is a metaphor for trading one mode of perception to another. I took this as burning everything you once knew to be common knowledge to the ground, and relearning everything you once thought you knew to be true from scratch.
Although this eye I've created, foretold in the previous pieces, represents new insight and knowledge, she hasn't forgotten why she was plucked in the first place.
