Sleepers Awake
I was spending most of my time welding at a studio in Santa Monica when I first heard about the imprisonment of Irina Ratushinskaya, a Russian poet and dissident. I was dumpster diving for materials on a Sunday and I found a discarded LA Times paper. In the Arts section, there was a full page write up about her.
On her 29th birthday in 1983, Irina Ratushinskaya was sentenced to the seven-year maximum term in a labor camp for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.” Her imprisonment did not diminish her mind or her influence on the rest of the world. She wrote over 200 poems in prison, often times using burned matchsticks to engrave words on bars of soap until she could memorize the poems then write them on cigarette paper she smuggled through her husband to the West, where they were published and empowered human rights groups.
Even though Ratushinskaya experienced four years of beatings, torture, a vitamin-deficient diet, and extreme conditions which most likely brought about the cancer that brought about her death, she never gave up. The Russian government compared her to MX missiles. Ratushinskaya’s companions in the labor camp’s “Small Zone,” a restricted area for “particularly dangerous female political criminals,” were described by the New York Times:
All of them were defiant nonconformists who chose imprisonment rather than renege on their political or religious principles. They included a leading activist of the Helsinki Watch committee, a recent convert to Roman Catholicism who received a 10-year term for helping an underground priest teach a children’s catechism class, a Pentecostal Christian and the editor of an underground, samizdat, journal dedicated to feminist issues such as the horrors of Soviet maternity wards. . .
I was so moved by the story about her that I was brought to tears mixed with anger. I went back to my studio and started welding the piece that would eventually become known as “Sleepers Awake.”
Sleepers Awake: painted, burned, welded found metal & wood.
77 X 93 X 23 inches (1983)
First exhibited at Hudson’s Feature Gallery, Chicago 1985
The piece was all about Ratushinskaya. I was moved by a penetrating force focused intently on sending healing and liberating energetic prayers to her. I worked intensely, morning, noon and night for months on the piece. Then, my studio was a tin can, and the piece was getting so big I had to cut out, and hinge a wall, to add more space to accommodate its growing presence.
Ratushinskaya’s story still moves me to this day, as it must also give heart to all those that continue to suffer as they carry this burning torch. Her struggle, strength of spirit, love and commitment to truth, freedom and her people, infused into her lyrical lines of poetry, like the ones below, have continued to inspire various paintings and series. This was the genesis of my creative intention to use my art to explore the vital, seen and unseen, connections across continents, time and all of creation…
Believe Me by Irina Ratushinskaya:
Believe me, it was often thus:
In solitary cells, on winter nights
A sudden sense of joy and warmth
And a resounding note of love.
And then, unsleeping, I would know
A-huddle by an icy wall:
Someone is thinking of me now,
Petitioning the Lord for me.
My dear ones, thank you all
Who did not falter, who believed in us!
In the most fearful prison hour
We probably would not have passed
Through everything – from end to end,
Our heads held high, unbowed –
Without your valiant hearts
to light our path.
‘Believe me’
Irina Ratushinskaya
(Kiev, 10 Oct. 1986)
