Look Me In The Eye — Tell Me To Smile! | Original Mixed Media Artwork | Stoofy

Artist Statement

There is a thing that gets said to women. On the street, in offices, by strangers and partners and people who have decided that a woman's neutral expression is a problem that belongs to them.

Smile, love.

Medusa does not smile.

Look Me In The Eye — Tell Me To Smile! is a portrait of ancient, accumulated, quietly incandescent female power. She is hand-cut from wood into a circular form — a target, a crown, a sun — and she radiates outward through concentric rings of hand-painted green, each band edged with gold-green glitter that shifts and catches the light as you move around her. At her centre, her face is rendered in deep magenta pink, Ben-Day dots applied individually across every surface of her skin. The snakes are blue and pink and green, every scale painted one by one — hundreds of them — their bodies moving with a rhythm that feels less like chaos and more like music. Some of them are watching you. None of them are apologising.

Her expression is calm. Completely, deliberately, magnificently calm.

This is not a piece about rage. It is a piece about what comes after rage — the deep, still, immovable knowledge of one's own power. The look that turns things to stone is not the look of someone losing control. It's the look of someone who finally, fully has it.

The work sits inside a political moment that claims to protect women while enabling their abuse. That uses the safety of women and children as rhetorical cover for agendas that have never once served either. That erases women over forty while elevating adolescence as the gold standard of beauty and value. That denies women equitable healthcare, financial parity, career progression — then calls them too emotional when they notice. That responds to female power with the same solution Perseus reached for: don't look directly at her. Use a mirror. Take her head.

Medusa was assaulted. Then punished for being assaulted. Then destroyed for surviving it. The system failed her at every stage and called it justice. She is still here. She is still being called a monster.

But underneath the noise — underneath the legislation aimed at our bodies, the rising tide of violence, the political rhetoric wearing compassion as a costume — there is a pulse. Women coming together. The quiet accumulation of enough. The decision, made individually and collectively, to stop making ourselves smaller and softer and more palatable for the comfort of people who never deserved that comfort.

We are not too emotional. We are not objects. We are not ugly or stupid or past it or too much.

We will silence you with a look.

LOOK ME IN THE EYE — TELL ME TO SMILE!

Mixed media on hand-cut shaped wood panel. Hand-painted acrylic, individually applied Ben-Day dots, one-by-one scale detailing, metallic enamel, green glitter, gold-green foil concentric rings, high-gloss archival varnish. Made in the UK by Stoofy. Signed, dated, Certificate of Authenticity included.

One of one. When it's gone, it's gone.