AWAKENINGS

100 cm x 42 cm x 19 cm

Mould blown glass, cut and polished, and mounted on white marble.

Awakenings is a piece based on the following events. In 1969 a doctor, Oliver Sacks, discovered the beneficial effects of the then new drug L-Dopa. He administered it to catatonic patients who survived the 1917-1928 epidemic of encephalitis lethargica. Leonard Lowe and the rest of the patients were awakened after decades of a catatonic state and had to deal with a new life in a new time; but the drug became uneffective and the patients fell back into their coma. This is represented by the piece seeming submerged until a point in the thoughts where there is a full moment of extreme consciousness.