A year ago, a group of artists & I created a 34×34″ mosaic/collage as a kind of physical prayer for the city & people of Eastern Aleppo, Syria.
For years I had been agonizing over the news emerging from Syria’s war–which as far as I could tell was mostly a war of the regime against some of its people, the ones who wanted to see change in their country. Taking a mosaic workshop (my second–it’s a medium that fascinates me) inspired me to launch this project. Jason Brown laid out a sketch, based on an online photo that haunted me.
It’s a tragic image of a city laid waste, but we didn’t want to communicate only despair. So as we began to fill out the sketch with tiles and broken ceramic pieces & fabric, we regularly included small bright objects: a beaded ring, earrings, a small red heart, unexpected bits of color. For some these symbolized precious lost things, but for me they stood for the spirited people of Aleppo & those who took great risks to help others: the doctors in underground hospitals, the White Helmets who hurried out to rescue those buried under rubble after a bombing raid.
I had learned a lot from Dr. Zaher Sahloul, a Chicago-based doctor who made multiple trips to Aleppo with the Syrian American Medical Society. So we decided to use the mosaic to raise funds for SAMS, along with the Syrian Community Network, founded by Suzanne Akhras Sahloul, which serves Syrian refugees in the Chicago area. A good friend offered his beautiful home for a gathering in March 2017; there we contemplated the mosaic, the Sahlouls talked to us about Syria, & we collected donations.
By then Eastern Aleppo had been evacuated for a few months: as the regime took over that sector, those wishing to leave had been bused to Idlib. There are other besieged & blockaded communities in Syria today, places where food, clean water & medical supplies are scarce. As I write, the Syrian regime’s army is advancing into Idlib Governate.
Our mosaic is called Aleppo Is My Breath Prayer, because sometimes the only prayer I could muster was “Aleppo, Aleppo,” whispered on rising & falling breath. In the Christian mystical tradition, a breath prayer is a word or phrase that you repeat quietly in the ordinary rhythm of inhalation and exhalation. Our work is an expression of our prayers for peace, justice, and restoration in the beautiful country of Syria. The piece hangs in the sanctuary of Living Water Community Church, to remind us to keep praying. A photo of it also appears on the back cover of the just-published anthology Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace (Glass Lyre Press).
I do not forget you, Syria.
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Aleppo Is My Breath Prayer, 2017
Artists: Ruth Goring, Jason Brown, Emily Klein, Ainsley Fleetwood, Katherine Lamb, Rebecca Larsen, Olga Mest, Jamie Daniel, Emily Bynum
Mounting: Ronald Frantz
Materials: ceramics (both tiles and broken dishes), abalone tile, rocks from Lake Michigan, bones, gold, old jewelry, cotton fabric, shells, clear glass, smalti and other glass tiles, copper, other metals, alcohol-based paint, acrylic paint, adhesives, permanent marker, and grout on composition board
Ruth Goring 