Iris in, Iris out: Reflections on the production, exhibition and viewing of a bisected-eyeball hand-puppet

Abstract

This article reflects upon my short visual recording Eyedrops: A Monoculogue (2021). It describes the thinking process of creative avoidance (both making something new, but recycling ideas and materials which already exist, both in the mind and close to hand); pleasure in making (the haptic joy of production); considerations of performance; being audience to one’s own work when exhibited alongside other work responding to the same initial call; re-presenting the work in a workshop context. While it draws upon interdisciplinary theoretical writing to provide phenomenological and ekphrastic considerations of the work, moving between the three-point dynamic which links and divides viewing positions: the image (screen), subject (eye) and the object (puppet), it employs an immediacy of writing, which resists the usual considerations of academic scholarship in a move to free up thinking and to expose the emotional and experiential, questioning what it is to ‘see’.