One Eye Breaks Her Oath

She is known for the fold of cloth across her eyes, the one detail that makes her Justice and not simply a woman with a sword. Here that cloth has slipped, just enough. One eye stays covered. The other is open, turned away from the viewer, fixed on something at the edge of the scale she is meant to hold level without ever looking at either side.

No paint, no print, no ink made this. The figure, the sword at her side and the scale above it exist because the acrylic glass has been taken away from itself, a field of individual marks shaped directly into the surface rather than placed onto it. The image is present at any hour, in any light, and does not depend on either to be seen.

The light gathers where it matters most. Her head, the bare shoulder, the raised arm and the scale itself hold the density of marks, built up until the surface reads as carved stone caught mid gesture. The sword drops into the dark at her side, more suggestion than object, and the lower folds of her robe dissolve into the same black the whole figure stands against, so that what remains lit is exactly what she is choosing to use, an eye, an arm, a set of scales, and nothing else.

Look at what sits in each pan. One holds coin, drawn thin, almost transparent against the dark. The other holds a bag, closed, solid, catching far more of the light than anything on the other side. The arm does not waver. The eye does. It has already decided which pan deserves watching.

One Eye Breaks Her Oath belongs to In Plain Sight, a series within Art with Scratch by Tijs Dragtsma in which imagery is constructed through controlled surface damage rather than pigment or print, and in which that same damage becomes a way of showing what everyone already half suspects about the scales we trust to stay level, that the hand holding them rarely needs to look to know which side it favors.

Light does not create this image, it sharpens it. Under direct light the scratches across her face and the chain of the scale catch and hold, the contrast deepens, and the piece reads differently depending on where you stand, without the open eye ever looking away from the bag.

"Blind was never the promise. Blind was only the costume."

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