Sherry Tompalski
These are the words of a refugee artist from El Salvador whose portrait was featured in Forced Migration: New Portraits of Refugees from Africa, Central Asia and Central America.
“I was almost killed in my country, I was tortured, I was arrested on 2 occasions, I was a student at the National Salvadorian University. It wasn’t a pretty sight. It was a difficult experience. I am putting this in a non-graphic way. I don’t want to make you sad. I want you to see that people change after so many years of being here. I am happy. I have found some peace in my heart after those 2 horrible experiences in prison…which included more than 1 week the first time…with no food, no sleeping, no water…and being beaten up by 7 soldiers, although, I couldn’t see anybody.
The first time I was put into a torture chamber, they put me on a chair and I was blindfolded. I was hand cuffed in the back. There was a minute of silence, complete silence, before they started to beat me up. It was at that point, when I could feel them around me…the breathing of these….people…I would call them people…I want to say another word, but I wont use it.
Then the second time…they drove us all over the city, they said they were going to take us to a big mountain where they used to throw people in sacks …and as people went down, they were obviously killed and mutilated into pieces….because of the sharp rocks, at the bottom of the mountain.”
Tompalski’s family emigrated to Canada from Odessa, Ukraine and Warsaw, Poland to escape the national and social discrimination found in Eastern Europe in the late 1800′s. Born in Saskatoon, she began her career as a medical doctor and psychiatrist, working with refugees, artists, soldiers, couples and families. Through this work she began to realize more clearly how the unprocessed losses suffered by her family had been transmitted down through 3 generations.
She became increasingly intrigued with portraiture, unprocessed trauma and filming the portrait sitting. The portraits evoke strong emotions and depict fragmented faces tangled in a turbulent world. The bold colours are a metaphor for the strong contradictory emotions that often go unprocessed for many years following traumatic events
“The work is developed in an exploratory fashion,” she says. “Paintings and drawings are sometimes torn-up and reassembled with a collage of mixed media elements.”
These reassembled “fractured faces” are precariously held together with elements from their new culture (i.e. sheet music from an Ottawa orchestra). The backgrounds of the portraits are crowded with exported video images (from the portrait sitting) that represent the reinvention of self that refugees must undergo. Some backgrounds include fragments of their recorded quotes.
“Basically, I’m trying to understand the process of overcoming loss and the tendrils of hope that allow one to survive.”
- Sherry Tompalski
