Ola Rondiak on Motanka Sculptures, Maidan, Gulag Memory, and Ukrainian Art

Ola Rondiak is a Ukrainian-American contemporary artist, sculptor, and former psychotherapist whose work explores identity, memory, displacement, and Ukrainian cultural resilience. Raised in the United States by Ukrainian immigrant parents, she later relocated to Kyiv, where her artistic practice deepened through engagement with Ukraine’s political upheavals and historical trauma. Known for her large-scale motanka sculptures, collage, and mixed-media works, Rondiak combines personal family history, women’s experiences, and national memory into visually layered narratives exhibited internationally.

In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen speaks with Ola Rondiak about the organic evolution of her art in Kyiv, from textiles and cardboard collages to canvas and large motanka sculptures. Rondiak links major creative turning points to the Orange Revolution, the Revolution of Dignity, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and family memories of Soviet repression, including her grandmother’s Gulag embroideries, framing Ukrainian identity, women’s resilience, cultural resistance, and healing through layered visual storytelling.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What was your first big exhibit in Kyiv?

Ola Rondiak: It all happened very organically because, professionally, I had been a psychotherapist. When I started having children, that was when I really began exploring art seriously. I started with fashion and textiles, which led into fabric collages. From there, I began painting on cardboard because we were moving boxes around and I started experimenting with the material. Eventually, I moved onto canvas, though canvas initially felt intimidating to me.

I did smaller exhibits and interviews over the years, and I also studied with individual artists in Kyiv, so there were gradual steps along the way. That is why it is hard to define one “first big exhibit.” Each one built on the previous one.

Jacobsen: Creative careers rarely move in a straight line. It is more like a timeline with a tangled ball of yarn in the middle.

Rondiak: Basically, yes.

Jacobsen: Which exhibit meant the most to you at the time?

Rondiak: Each one mattered when it happened. During the Orange Revolution in 2004, I started doing many paintings and created a calendar based on them. I gave a few interviews, which felt like a big deal for me at the time, and some of the paintings were displayed at the Pavlo Tychyna Museum.

Every step is exciting, but also humbling at the same time because there is always something else to aspire toward.

Then, right before the Revolution of Dignity in 2013, once the children were all in school, I became much more disciplined about treating myself as an artist. I realized I needed to work full days whether I felt inspired or not. I turned our garage into a studio and began working seriously every day.

After several months, a friend came over and saw paintings of women everywhere. She said, “This is kind of creepy. You should do an exhibit in our garden.” She had a beautiful home with a rose garden, so we organized an outdoor exhibition there. I called it 50 Women because I counted the paintings and there were exactly fifty of them. Most were on paper or cardboard.

We invited friends and people from the art community, and we sold almost everything. The prices were modest, around $100 to $400, but for me the feeling was enormous. I thought, “Okay, this is real. Now I can buy canvases, buy paints, and move to the next level.”

Jacobsen: After those sales, did you have that internal transition from canvas as threatening to non-threatening?

Rondiak: Less threatening, yes, because it gave me confidence. That is how people wanted the work.

Jacobsen: That is a very common theme, from big names to emerging artists: the lack of confidence or self-assurance.

Rondiak: Yes. Well, it is a big world, right? When you think about the art world and you are going to these grand museums, it can feel like such a mystery.

Jacobsen: Maybe also, acutely, the Ukrainian art scene is primarily domestic. It is not fully integrated internationally.

Rondiak: Correct. That was very intimidating as well.

Jacobsen: I know there is Voloshyn Gallery. They have Kyiv and Miami, but there are not many like that.

Rondiak: Correct. Especially then.

Jacobsen: So 2004 and 2013 were big markers.

Rondiak: Those were big markers, yes.

Jacobsen: What about the Revolution of Dignity? What about the first annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas, in addition to the full-scale invasion, or “special military operation,” as the euphemism goes?

Rondiak: Yes. In 2014, when Crimea was illegally annexed, I started creating my motanka sculptures. I had gone to a motanka workshop previously. I had not known about the motanka doll in childhood, growing up in the diaspora, so I learned about it here. I did the workshop because they are rag dolls made with fabrics.

When the war started, I had an aha moment: to change the rag doll into a permanent sculpture and create it on a larger scale as a talisman. My very first one came from what was near me, the way mothers in the old days would take whatever rags were nearby. What was near me was masking tape, so I made my first sculpture, about this big, out of masking tape. Then I started papier-mâchéing it. Then I started plastering and making them out of plaster.

That spoke to me because plaster is the material we use to heal broken bones, to make casts. Symbolically, it became about healing Ukrainians from the war.

At one of my early openings, I made my first large one, probably five or six feet tall, out of plaster. We had the opening at Tadzio Gallery in the centre. I left it white and asked everyone at the opening to sign it with their wishes for Ukraine, like people do in America when they sign casts. They did not really do that here, so I explained it to them. It became a beautiful thing.

Later, that exhibition travelled to Lviv, to Dzyga Gallery, so the sculpture has signatures from both Kyiv and Lviv. The wishes were things like “Slava Ukraini,” “Freedom for Ukraine,” “God bless you,” “Thank you for doing this,” and “This is inspiring.”

It was post-Maidan patriotism. You started hearing more Ukrainian. It was the beginning of this patriotic uprising, things I had grown up with as a diaspora Ukrainian, like wearing vyshyvanka for holidays. Those things started happening here. Women began wearing vinoks, not only for traditional occasions, but also because it was fun and cool. You started hearing Ukrainian more on the streets of Kyiv. Slowly, there was this cultural uprising.

Jacobsen: But you are speaking more in terms of culture.

Rondiak: Yes, and a lot of it was east and west together. That was a big part of the theme: east and west together, that Ukraine was not divided. There was talk of civil war, and we all knew that was propaganda, so we were trying to fight the propaganda.

Jacobsen: At this point, I think there is a pretty deep inoculation against the propaganda, at least among the Ukrainian population.

Rondiak: Yes, absolutely.

Jacobsen: How did you see the evolution of themes from 2014 to 2022?

Rondiak: In my work? How would I describe the evolution? I do not know. I guess I just grew into my themes. I have to look at it from the outside a little bit. I think I am a storyteller, combining different layers of experience. A lot of it emerged as I went along, discovering what was coming out of me and through me.

One of my earlier exhibits was called Identity Interrupted because it reflected what I had experienced growing up as a first-generation American with Ukrainian immigrant parents. I felt Ukrainian because that was what differentiated me from my American friends. It was where I spent my summers, weekends, and most of my free time. Then, when I moved to Ukraine, people looked at me and said, “You are American.” And I thought, “Wait, yes, I do have a U.S. passport.”

Jacobsen: Third culture.

Rondiak: Exactly. My identity felt interrupted, so I began exploring that through art. More and more, I started exploring my own family history. I felt there was this triptych in my life: my family history, raising my children and watching them move from childhood into adulthood, and everything happening in Ukraine through the revolutions and the war. All of it felt layered together.

That is probably why collage became one of my first major forms of experimentation. In retrospect, things felt chaotic both personally and politically. I was gathering newspapers and magazines, everything being written about the revolutions and the war, and incorporating them into the collages. There were also specific works that guided me emotionally and symbolically.

One of those involved an icon my grandmother had embroidered while imprisoned in the Gulag during the 1950s. That story is really a story in itself.

When my mother was growing up in Kolomyia in western Ukraine during the Second World War, my grandfather had already been arrested several times by the Soviets for anti-Soviet speech and Ukrainian patriotism. He had been imprisoned and tortured to the point that my mother barely recognized him when he returned home. When the war intensified, the family understood he would likely be executed if he stayed.

My grandmother told him to take their daughter and flee farther west because she believed the daughter would protect him. They ended up spending about a year traveling on foot across Ukraine and through parts of Central Europe, eventually reaching Austria. At one train station, someone recognized my grandfather from a photograph and told him his son was in Vienna. They eventually reunited there.

Hearing those stories later reminded me strongly of what happened again during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. People leave believing it is temporary and that they will return home soon. No one imagines they may never return.

Meanwhile, my aunt died in western Ukraine, and my grandmother was sentenced to 25 years in the Gulag in Mordovia for helping the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. She was sent to a women’s hard-labour camp. After exhausting days of physical labour, she secretly embroidered icons at night with the hope that one day they might reach her family.

When Khrushchev released many political prisoners in the late 1950s, she returned to western Ukraine. She smuggled the embroideries inside her clothing and entrusted them to a stranger travelling to America, asking him to try to locate her family. An article was eventually published in Chicago about these embroideries from Soviet prison camps, and through the Ukrainian diaspora network, the family in Ohio was found. Most of the embroideries were returned to us.

One embroidery affected me especially deeply because it was an unfinished icon. In 2014, when I began creating a collage based on that icon, I realized it felt like my contemporary continuation of my grandmother’s work. I began thinking perhaps her icon was unfinished because Ukraine itself had not yet fully realized itself. At the time, I did not know the war would continue for so many more years.

I later created another work in her honour using her embroideries and letters to my mother. After about ten years, they had finally been allowed to communicate by letter, although they never saw each other again.

Jacobsen: What stood out to you most in those letters?

Rondiak: I am still processing them. In one letter, she wrote to my mother, “I sent you with your father to protect him.” Interestingly enough, that story actually came true. When they were in Hungary, I think, a communist soldier was holding a gun to my grandfather’s head. My mother ran out of the house, screaming and crying, grabbed his leg, and said, “Do not shoot him. Do not shoot him.” The soldier let him go.

My mother describes it in her memoirs. Somewhere deep inside, he must have felt a conscience or something, and he let him go. So, in the end, she did save him when she was 12 or 13 years old.

Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Ola.

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Scott Douglas Jacobsen is a Writer-Editor for The Good Men Project with more than 1,800 publications on the platform. He is the Founder and Publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343; 978-1-0673505) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN, 0018-7399; Online: ISSN, 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), Humanist Perspectives (ISSN: 1719-6337), A Further Inquiry (SubStack), Vocal, Medium, The New Enlightenment Project, The Washington Outsider, rabble.ca, and other media. His bibliography index can be found via the Jacobsen Bank at In-Sight Publishing comprised of more than 10,000 articles, interviews, and republications, in more than 200 outlets. He has served in national and international leadership roles within humanist and media organizations, held several academic fellowships, and currently serves on several boards. He is a member in good standing in numerous media organizations, including the Canadian Association of Journalists, PEN Canada (CRA: 88916 2541 RR0001), and Reporters Without Borders (SIREN: 343 684 221/SIRET: 343 684 221 00041/EIN: 20-0708028), and others.