EYETAL
A gaze turned inward — and outward.
Creative Lineage
Artist-originated design · Seeded through lived encounters with white T-shirt and street culture · Envisioned for the urban block and for young men whose strength and vulnerability the artist had witnessed · The paired eye-form carries a Kemetic inheritance of restoration, protection, and celestial seeing older than the garment · Right and left eyes open toward solar and lunar relation · Digital final with Bevil Byam · Organic production with TS Designs · Later AI dialogue in interpretation only; AI visual revisions were not adopted
The Encounter
Long before EYETAL became an image, the white T-shirt was already part of my lived environment.
I had seen it on the block in Southeast Washington, D.C., in New York streetwear culture, and on young Black men I encountered along the road through New Jersey.
In one of those moments, I felt two things at once:
strength
and vulnerability.
The encounter stayed with me long before EYETAL became a design.
The Audience
The white T helped me see who I imagined EYETAL being worn by.
I envisioned the design for the urban block.
I thought of young men moving through that environment—the same strength and vulnerability that had stayed with me from those earlier encounters.
I imagined EYETAL on a body, in that environment.
The Two Eyes
The eyes carried something older than my own intention.
In the Kemetic inheritance, the paired Eyes of Horus could be read in solar and lunar relation:
the right eye with the sun,
the left eye with the moon.
In the Horus restoration narrative, the left, lunar eye is injured and restored—the Wedjat, made sound or whole again—and carries an ancient field of restoration and protection.
The solar eye carries the complementary movement of illumination and outward radiance.
I was working with forms that already carried inherited associations of seeing, restoration, and protection.
The Protective Field
That inheritance extends beyond the eye alone.
Wadjet and Nekhbet—the cobra and vulture, the Two Ladies of Lower and Upper Egypt—belong to the wider Kemetic field of guardianship and protection.
I hold them as part of the larger protective field surrounding the imagery, while preserving their distinct identities within that tradition.
My intention was to carry that inheritance into EYETAL and toward the contemporary wearer I had in mind.
Almost like visual armor for the block.
I carry that protection here as symbolic inheritance brought into a present environment.
The Becoming
I worked carefully with the proportions of the geometry.
The pupils became mirrored infinity forms, each also readable as an 8.
Precision mattered because the relationship between the forms mattered.
Bevil Byam later helped bring the design to its digital final.
The Name
EYETAL came through ITAL.
ITAL carried a relationship to natural, earth-based, organic and largely unprocessed living.
I chose EYE rather than I.
The word turned toward seeing.
And toward the one who sees.
Into Cloth
When EYETAL entered physical production, the garments were organic.
That choice belonged to the same relationship already present in the name:
ITAL → EYETAL.
The garment and the word were meant to answer one another.
Beyond the Surface
One eye opens toward the sun.
One eye opens toward the moon.
One movement illuminates.
One carries the memory of restoration.
Together they do not ask me to choose between seeing outward and seeing inward.
They hold both.
The gaze meets the block.
The gaze also returns through itself.
And beneath the question:
What am I looking at?
another question opens:
What is doing the seeing?
The eye becomes mirror.
The mirror returns the gaze.
Outward seeing and inward awareness meet in the same field.
The Remembrance
The white T.
The block.
Strength and vulnerability.
Two eyes carrying an ancient inheritance.
Sun and moon.
Illumination and restoration.
A wider field of guardianship.
Infinity held inside the gaze.
ITAL becoming EYETAL.
Seeing outward.
Seeing inward.
See clearly.
Stand present.
EYETAL
Reflect OurSelves