The Eye That Navigates: Anchor Without Chain

Mixed media assemblage by Cheryl Fudge

16"w x 12"h

This is not a map. It is a reckoning.

At the center of The Eye That Navigates: Anchor Without Chain rests a reclaimed wooden form—part mariner’s wheel, part ancient talisman. It suggests guidance without control, an anchor that does not bind, but steadies.

Beneath it, a faded seascape unfolds: a vintage painting, horizon soft with memory, weathered as if touched by salt. Upon this, pieces of worn canvas drift like islands—cut, re-stitched, their edges frayed with stories. Two circular forms, taken from an old art book, watch from within the collage. They are eyes. They are instruments. They are witnesses.

This piece is a meditation on sight—how we look, how we’re seen, and what we choose not to see. It is about skin, not as a dividing line, but as a navigation tool evolved by nature. Dark skin is in fact the most evolved of all—developed over millennia to protect the body from the sun’s most unforgiving light. It is not a difference to overcome. It is brilliance. It is adaptation. It is survival.

And yet, we have mistaken this beauty for threat. Mistaken pigment for permission. For centuries, those with the darkest skin were taken across oceans, against their will, in the holds of ships—enslaved not for who they were, but for how they appeared. The blues and greens of this work call to those waters. To that silence. To that stolen passage.

The piece holds space for this truth. It doesn’t explain. It listens.

Because to see each other clearly is the only map we’ve ever needed.