For this image, I wanted to reverse the anatomical expectation when it comes to penetration. I’m the licker, and my tongue is touching the eye of my ex-husband, artist Paul Ramirez Jonas. A lot of the works I make stem from a desire. In this case, I wanted to know the taste of his vision. Of course, it’s an unrealizable desire, as are some of the most interesting desires we have.

To me, there’s something very sweet about this photograph, because I thought it was an act of trust for him to let me lick his eye. But I learned that people have phobias around eyes, and that some people have a hard time even looking at the image.

Still, the image speaks to a kind of confusion of the senses that’s akin to synesthesia, the rare neurological condition in which the stimulation of one sense involuntarily triggers another. Children also go through a stage where they put everything in their mouths as a way of knowing and exploring their world.

The photograph was taken with an 8-by-10 camera, and I like to say the view is a little closer than intimate. The original print is neither portrait nor landscape format: It’s square. I think that slows the viewer down and creates a bit of disorientation. I printed it as large as I could at the time without having a break in the paper. It’s 4-by-4-feet, which seems small now that we’re so used to enormous images.

Often, it’s things I can’t know that trigger my imagination, like looking into the eyes of a lover and trying to understand what they’re seeing when they look back at me. When I first had the idea for this piece, I really wanted to block his vision with my tongue—to lick the pupil. There’s so much to say about the gaze and what it means. But as so often happens, when you actually make the piece, it reveals to you what it wants to be.

I assumed licking his pupil would be a challenge, so I asked my father, who was a doctor, for something to numb his eye. The more I thought about it, though, the more it scared me: If he couldn’t feel my tongue, I could cause damage. We decided not to use it.

When it came time to take the picture, we ran into another problem. The coming-together of his eye socket and my mouth created this dark cave, and we didn’t have enough light to get the level of detail I was after. So we brought in an external flash. That meant Paul not only had a tongue in his eye, but also a bright flashing light.

When I saw the sheet of negatives after the shoot, though, I was really interested in the way Paul’s eye rolled back to avoid both the tongue and the light. It made the image feel much more like a conversation between the eye and the tongue. I thought about the many saints depicted in ecstasy, with their eyes rolled back, too.

—As told to Emily Watlington