A social worker and psychotherapist by training, Ola Rondiak has been living in Ukraine for the past 25 years. Her professional experience and family history has born the evidence of much psychological trauma. Her grandparents were imprisoned and tortured for simply being Ukrainian; she witnessed her parents, and many others, being forced to leave their homes; and yet, she witnessed a post-soviet country grow into an independent, democratic society. As a result, training and family history informs her work as an artist particularly in this current body of work, Committed, with freedom holding strong personal resonance. 

What better symbol as the antithesis of freedom than the straitjacket. Synonymous with confinement and imprisonment, this outmoded form of restraint used to control violent patients committed to psychiatric wards. But here is where Rondiak flips the script to muzzle conventional use. Her sense of personal responsibility to create one’s own freedom lays bare what once symbolized restraint. So, she seamlessly commits to bridging family history with contemporary couture by reshaping the straitjacket into trendy one-of-a-kind wearable works of art. Rondiak’s straitjackets are not your standard issue ready-to-wear outer garment. She refashions the idea of freedom simply by cutting the sleeves and turning the jacket, where the back becomes the front. Like her embellished and colorful canvases, she meticulously stitches or paints the object with layers of images, words, or phrases like a diary.

Highly conversant, tactile, and imbued with emotion, they are part autobiographical and part metaphorical. The narrow, straight arm sleeves represent restriction. Displayed with arm sleeves folded, they can evoke an abiding sense of comfort through the iconographic images of women who represent strength. A symbol of utter control has transmogrified into an image of freedom and an expressive fashion statement of vitality. For Rondiak, the very act of the creative process can be a liberating experience, especially during a pandemic. Many have felt imprisoned during the pandemic. We long for freedom and a return to normal life. We’re ready to relinquish the fetters that bound us to house and home. As schools, businesses, and everyday life begins to open, Rondiak invites the viewer to re-examine--maybe even commit to--what freedom means, to question one’s role in the fruits of toxic confinement, and question one’s own binding mental prisons.

Over 100 years ago, German seamstress Agnes Richter embroidered her own narrative onto the uniform that confined her to a psychiatric clinic. Now on display at the University of Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic, the jacket, like Rondiak’s, has become a powerful statement revealing the transformative nature of art. Both women exploring the fabric of life have turned a personal, pedestrian object into a deeply felt record of personal experience.