Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons is one of the best-known Cuban artists of her generation. Her work engages with the history and traditions of the African diaspora, often referring to the religious and storytelling rituals that inform the lives of many Afro-Cubans today.

Campos-Pons was already an experienced and innovative printmaker before making this print. Here, using digital processes to create a ’layered’ image, she has 'tattooed' eyes onto a view of her own back, bringing various ideas into play. It suggests the black body as the site of a voyeuristic gaze, but the pattern also evokes a design of peacock feathers - a kind of glorious adornment of the body, especially in religious ritual.

The black scholar and intellectual W. E. B. Dubois (1868-1963) proposed that black people were perpetually aware of their inner self as seen by the white viewer. Such awareness, he said, produces a kind of divided self, to be constantly negotiated and reconciled. This print could be read as a reference to this idea of seeing oneself from the outside, in an unexpected and particular way. The print was also produced in a different colourway - with blue instead of brown eyes.