What is this image? Is it some kind of map? Actually, yes, but not the usual kind. This is ‘the topography of tears’—extremely close up images of dried human tears of every kind. Basal tears that lubricate our eyes, psychic tears that we shed in emotion, and reflex tears that drip down our chin when we cut an onion. The above are ‘tears of timeless reunion’.
See the rest of the series here or read this Smithsonian profile of the artist, Rose-Lynn Fisher, who says of the subject of her art: “Tears are the medium of our most primal language in moments as unrelenting as death, as basic as hunger and as complex as a rite of passage. It’s as though each one of our tears carries a microcosm of the collective human experience, like one drop of an ocean.”
