Intimacy and proximity acquired by gaze was the origin of this project. After long research around gaze and optical apparatuses, I fortuitously stumbled into Treasuring Gaze: Eye Miniature Portraits and the Intimacy of Vision written by Hanneke Grootenboer.

What came as a breakthrough, was the desire to capture the other’s gaze in something Grootenboer recalls from Marcia Pointon’s work, an expert who wrote extensively on British miniature portraiture:

“Taking the miniaturist’s exclusive focus on eyes as a confirmation of how gazing games revolve around portrait miniatures, Pointon considers the eye portrait as a condensed form of the miniature. Pace Pointon, I contend that the painted eye is not a synecdoche; it does not metonymically represent the whole face and, to go further, does not stand in for a loved one’s face, and not even for his or her eye. Rather, it stands in for his or her gaze. As a portrayal of a gaze rather than part of a face, the eye picture adds a significant aspect to the network of gazing games that remains unaddressed in portrait miniatures: namely, how the beholder could be subjected to someone’s gaze in the sense that she or he becomes a sight.”

Taking into account this story, the gazing game became a vital part of this piece. It became a minimal abstraction of that proximity, one that without the same context radically changed the perception and the aim of these simple objects. It shifted the power of being placed to place oneself voluntarily to closeness, from mere scrutiny to admiration.