Medusa (Medyusa)

Medusa (Medyusa) — the Gorgon whose gaze turned the living to stone and whose severed head became Perseus's most powerful weapon — appears in Hagiwara's Greek Mythology series as a subject dense with paradoxes: beauty and terror in the same face, power achieved through victimization, vision as both gift and weapon. The serpent hair that replaced Medusa's original beauty gave Hagiwara's carved surfaces a subject of extraordinary textural complexity. The sosaku-hanga technique, which worked by carving into the wood's surface, found in Medusa's snaky crown a natural counterpart to the gouge-marks of the carving tool.