Dark Side Of See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil

This piece began as an attempt to strip a familiar idea down to something more honest and less symbolic in the traditional sense. The Three Wise Monkeys have always been presented as moral figures yet the phrase itself carries a quiet tension. To see nothing to hear nothing to speak nothing is not always wisdom. Sometimes it is decay.

I imagined what those ideas would become if they were left in darkness for too long. Not preserved as philosophy but abandoned as instinct. The forms grew into a single column rather than separate figures because the behaviors are not isolated. They build on each other. What is ignored becomes internal. What is unheard festers. What is unspoken eventually forces its way out.

The top face is overwhelmed by cockroaches not as decoration but as occupation. They do not cover the eyes gently. They claim them. Their bodies are smooth and reflective against the collapsing texture of the flesh which creates a tension between vitality and rot. The blindness here is not passive. It is alive and persistent.

The middle face carries the weight of intrusion. The scorpions anchor themselves at the ears as if they have always belonged there. Their forms are rigid and deliberate. There is no chaos in them. Only pressure and control. The act of not hearing becomes something imposed rather than chosen. The skin around them yields as if it has accepted its role.

The lowest face breaks the structure entirely. The mouth cannot contain what it refused to release. Spiders emerge as a quiet inevitability rather than a sudden violence. They move outward with purpose. This is the consequence of silence stretched too far. Not an explosion but a slow and undeniable undoing.

The totem itself is not built from bone or structure. It is soft and unstable. It sags under its own weight as if it has no core left to hold it together. The absence of a surrounding void was intentional. By removing the heavy darkness the forms are forced into the open. There is nowhere for them to hide. Every texture every tear every intrusion exists in full view.

The drawing relies on restraint as much as detail. The white space becomes as important as the ink. Highlights are not added but preserved. They exist as fragments of untouched paper that resist being consumed. This creates a fragile balance between surface and depth. Between what remains and what is being lost.

In the end the piece is less about horror and more about accumulation. It is about what happens when small acts of avoidance become a foundation. When silence is layered over time until it reshapes the body itself. The figures are not victims of something external. They are the result of their own conditions carried too far to return from.