The works are built in horizontal bands, layered one over another: fields of writhing, worm-like marks pressed into black or deep teal, and running through them a strip that holds a pair of half-seen eyes, or the body of a single painted fish.
What the work does creeps up on you slowly. The eyes surface through the dark like something you almost missed, a gaze caught between waking and going under.
Once you know they belong to young people lost in a drug haze, the whole image tilts, and the seething, restless textures around them stop being decorative and start to feel like an inner weather, the churn beneath the surface. The fish, caught in its clean band of light between the murk above and below, becomes something fragile trying to hold its shape in a current that wants to pull it apart.
The message reaches you as concern rather than judgment. Stefka lays these lives out with tenderness, giving the buried gaze a place to be seen instead of looking away. The layered bands keep the darkness and the fragile bright strip in the same frame. That is the quiet plea of the work: that the ones drifting under are still there, still looking back, still worth meeting eye to eye.
