Owl – right

This amazing embroidery is a part of the 12-piece Living Eyes series, a series of beautiful and intriguing animal-eye close-ups. It can be purchased and admired as a single piece of 30 x 30 cm (11.8 x 11.8 in), or you can get more pieces from the series for your home, office or business premises. The motif is available as two separate smaller embroidered pieces (the left and right eye, respectively), or as a 2-piece set of 30x60 cm (11,8 x 23,6 in), giving you the perfect gaze into the eyes of the owl.

If you lock your gaze with the owl, one cannot help but become uneasy, as the thought crosses the mind: is the owl looking at us as prey, a tasty morsel, or is the owl considering us with a lazy disinterest. Owl eyes are giant in proportion to their heads, evolved to allow superb eyesight in the dark of night, being able to see their prey from afar when us humans would stumble blindly in the darkness. These beautiful eyes are the pinnacle of millions of years of evolution and a reminder that the animal kingdom uses unique specializations to create big advantages. To us, owl eyes give a hint of ancient wisdom to the animal, which is why we have antropomorphized the owl as a wise teacher full of knowledge. The embroidery before you shows this ancient wisdom, wonderfully encased in colorful threads.

In ancient Greece, they believed that a light and even fire emanates from an eye, seizing the surrounding world with its rays. It opens to the world and grasps more than any words can say. And like a portal to one’s inside, it can reveal a lot, even things that cannot or would not be said with words. It really is the window to the soul and the mirror of our world. Gazes of animals are mesmerizing and at the same time a powerful reminder of who we are in this world and of how co-dependent we all are on the planet we share.