DAMIEN Walker lovingly pieces together the broken bodies and faces of Jesus and his saints every day.
Mr Walker, a young New Zealand-based artist, had just finished high school when a magnitude-6.2 earthquake hit Christchurch in 2011.
The quake claimed 185 lives and left widespread property damage.
Statues of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Our Lady, St Joseph and other saints lay shattered after the quake in parishes across Christchurch.
The city had no one to restore or repair the art.
“So I just came out of school and thought, ‘Right, let’s go for it’,” Mr Walker said.
Statues came to him in hundreds of chipped and cracked pieces, and he was putting them back together.
“Some parishes had lost everything,” he said.
“By installing their restored artworks back into the church, repainting them, and building them, it gives them life and hope again.”
One community badly hit by the quake was the cathedral parish.
The quake felled the two bell towers in the facade of Christchurch’s Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament.
The cathedral’s dome was later demolished because the supporting structure had been weakened and, in 2021, work to deconstruct the remainder of the cathedral was completed.
Then-Christchurch Bishop Paul Martin, now the Archbishop of Wellington, gifted the kauri timber from the dome to Mr Walker’s studio, asking him to use it in his work.
Mr Walker was in Brisbane recently for the installation of a statue of St Rita and a crucifix that hangs over the altar at St Rita’s Church, Victoria Point.
The crucifix was hewn from the kauri timber. It was a “little sacred token” from Christchurch, he said.
Victoria Point parish priest Fr Ladu Yanga said he was grateful to have found Damien to “facilitate the creation of the statue of St Rita, our patron saint, as well as the new crucifix for above our altar”.
“Being that Damien is located in New Zealand, it meant that we were able to have these items made and shipped to us in a timely and cost-effective way,” he said.
“If we had to commission an artist from Europe in this current climate, we would have faced an unknown time schedule to receive these items and the cost would have been exorbitant.”
Fr Yanga said the parish was happy with the final products, which were donated by the Tomarchio family and blessed by Augustinian priest Fr Francis Belcina.
In the past decade Mr Walker’s art studio, the Studio of St Philomena, has restored more than 120 pieces of art.
St Philomena, the patron saint of children, was a dear friend of Mr Walker.
“She found me,” he said.
“Several years ago, I was really unwell, had a very bad blood condition and, by the grace of God … she (St Philomena) interceded on my behalf and I got miraculously cured.
“Naming the studio ‘St Philomena’ was a way of saying thank you to her.”
The demand for Mr Walker’s expertise has meant he has moved from restoration and repair with specific art pieces towards parish beautification and development.
“Beauty can help bring people back to the Church,” he said.
He said Christ used the beauty of himself through the Church, through the liturgy, through the arts to draw people back to him.
“I’ve seen it happen,” he said. “I helped restore a beautiful church in Amberley, New Zealand, which was originally built by the sixth prime minister of New Zealand.
“The studio I work for won an award for that restoration, and it has now become a mini-pilgrimage site.”
Mr Walker said the beauty of the church was thanks in part to the colours advised by Heritage England – green representing the tree, blue representing the living water gushing from Christ’s side, and red representing Christ’s blood.
“Incorporating these colours was a way to make the building speak and convey a theology with the colours,” he said.
“The growth of beauty will also support the ministries in that community.”
One of the works Mr Walker is most proud of is an icon of Ko Hata Maria, te Matua Wahine o te Atua (“Holy Mary, Mother of God”).
The piece was commissioned by the New Zealand Catholic Bishops Conference as part of a renewal of the 1838 dedication of Aotearoa New Zealand to Our Lady Assumed into Heaven post-COVID.
Mr Walker worked on the icon for 18 months. The bishops had asked him to depict Mary in a way that connected her to the people and country.
Child Jesus in her arms was dressed in a way that represented him as “the high chief”, while the clothing worn by Mary depicted her status as the “highest woman” and the “Queen Mother” in Maori tradition.
“She’s leading us, drawing us, teaching us, pointing us towards Christ,” Mr Walker said.
“Sacred art and beautiful art should be directional, which should always point us and lead us to Christ.”
Mr Walker has a great appreciation for the classic images of Catholicism, having built a rare and large collection of plaster moulds, which are essential to his day-to-day work.
But the mission to bring beauty into the Church was not just about the classics; he was always learning about innovations in design, especially in how it related to young people.
He said there was lots of competition for the human gaze.
“Especially these days we’re in the Instagram era, you know, the instant technology, everything’s fast and colourful,” he said.
The question, he said, was how could the Church build upon the beautiful tones and colours the secular world was using, in its own way.
“It’s drawing upon the inspiration and beauty from different places, looking back to the past from the tradition where we come from, but then looking forward into the future and making the images and pieces relevant for today,” he said.
Mr Walker said parishes were revived around that inspiration.
For more on The Studio of St Philomena visit: thestudioofsaintphilomena.com
