Rise (2018)

Material: Graphite

Surface: Illustration Board

Inspired by The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

What Alek’s story demonstrated was not just the cruelty of the human condition but it’s resilience. Aleksandr’s love for his people and his countrymen would spawn one of the most detailed accounts of the Soviet labour camp system ever recorded. The book itself, was the genesis of this hardship and represented the author's rise from the abyss. The story of the existence of this book, was similar to the very archetypal stories where a hero ventures into the evil unknown and finally rises above it, conquering it. This is what rise touches on. It’s a response to this observation from how the large figure overcomes and consumes the unknown husk it’s enveloping. This also works in conjunction with the visual language where a lot of wispy marks are used in order to give the essence of an abyss-like environment.

I was interested in Alek's work because of my interest in soviet history. I was constantly inundated with the horrors of facism and the third Reich but not much on the Soviet Union. At the time of this piece's creation, there was a lot of discourse surrounding the communist system. So I decided to read a lot into it and what I discovered was equally as cruel and as horrifying. I wanted to give more exposure to these heinous acts because it felt like western discourse was actively ignoring it. For example, we hear a lot of the Holocaust but not much about the Holodomor. Even in today's political climate and the war in Ukraine currently raging on, the atrocities from the Holodomor are still not mentioned. I felt it was important to expose some of these truths and express their resolution within a singular work.

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