In Phantom Gaze, the concept of the “spiritual autopsy” lies at the core of Femi Dawkins’ practice. It is a method or ritual of interior excavation. Although death is a fundamental node, it explores the living traces of harm, rage, and inherited grief within the body and spirit. Dawkins approaches his making as a process of deep looking into where ancestral memory lingers as a source of compassion. This form of clinical, sacred, unflinching introspection is how he unearths his haunting visual language.

The Politics of Quietness: Quiet in Dawkins’ work is a political and spiritual gesture. His drawings reject the economy of spectacle that historically rendered Black death a form of public entertainment through lynchings, gladiatorial games, executions, and televised brutality. So the awe the work inspires in its sublime form causes an disarmament and quiet that makes us listen.

Invocation: Dawkins’ considers his practice also as an act of invocation. The marks he makes are ritualistic of washing, witnessing, and paying respect for those lives that have been overlooked. In his series My Ghostly MRIs, each smoky structural line can be seen as a devotional gesture toward the dead who were never grieved properly.

Diastral Longing: The artist introduces the term “diastral longing” to describe the psychic condition of those severed from ancestral geographies like chromosomes are pulled apart during the diaster stage. His work grapples with the consequences of human displacement and generational rupture. These longings are mapped across the surface of the paper like migratory routes, spectral evidence of lost homes and severed kinships. The quiet caused by the sublime in his works leads to a response of psychological scattering and seeking within that noise.

Deconstructing the Spectacle of Violence: In the Phantom Gaze series, Dawkins confronts the ethics of witnessing and spectatorship. Early works retain direct imagery like nooses, bodies and physical trauma, but as his practice evolved, he began to abstract the violence by going deeper. He removes the noose, then the figure itself disappears. What remains are thorns, bones, Hebrew letters, mangroves and thistles, symbols that carry memory without reenacting brutality. This shift the gaze and participation in the consumption of the spectacle of violence inwards, into the eternal, beyond physical limitations.