Artist Mike Drake has taken something that few people talk about, and turned it into art. After gathering a group of WW2 era prosthetic eyes from the estate of a doctor, Drake spoke with American Foundation for the Blind members to hear their stories. He then built upon their experiences and extrapolated them into glass paperweights, each featuring a real glass eye.
One paperweight features a miniature devil and a syringe, based on the tale of a drug addict who woke up one morning missing an eye. Another shows an eye wrapped in twine, inspired by a vet who liked to hide his spare eye in a ball of yarn to scare his wife. yet another features a handful of spent bullet casings, it is surrounded by an outer ring of resin to show the isolation a young soldier felt after losing his eye.
The ten eye paperweights are being auctioned with 50% of the proceeds going to the American Foundation for the Blind, an award winning national nonprofit that expands possibilities for the more than 25 million people with vision loss in the U.S.
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