A HARSH European winter – minus 10 degrees Celsius – had left half of Ziggy Pawlikowski’s face paralysed.
He went back to Poland to see his parents, and sought medical treatment at the time, but after returning to England still paralysed, his wife, Lucy, reminded him of their promise – “if they had any medical problems, they were going to return to Australia”.
They left an art restoration business and an art residency in Canterbury to return home to the warmer climate of Australia. Ziggy’s paralysis healed three days after landing in Melbourne.
“No pills – nothing,” he said.
Lucy said their return to Australia in 2008 “was meant to be”. For the Polish-born Catholic couple this medical episode was a confirmation of where God wanted them to be.
“We are from a very Catholic country, we’re very strong on tradition; it’s part of our lives, part of our family life – you have to go to Church,” Ziggy said.
“And that’s fine, but that it was here, in the Land of the Holy Spirit where we experienced God on a more personal level. He became our daily companion, our friend and saviour. You need feelings, you need a real Lord, you need to almost touch him to be with him every day, following him.”
Lucy said Australia had been a blessing.
“Everything that we have received in spiritual connection – who we are – we received in this country,” she said. “We were not looking for it and we didn’t know it existed, it just happened.”
In 1987, when communism still gripped Poland, the couple, both carrying Masters in Fine Arts from Cracow’s Academy of Fine Arts, left the country through an Italian refugee camp. “Sydney or Melbourne”, they were told were the places for artists to go. But when World Expo ‘88 rolled around, the couple decided to move to Brisbane and found work.
The couple spent the next three decades balancing stable incomes and further study with their artistic endeavours, particularly in sacred art. Lucy started a career in education in 2013, currently teaching art at St Benedict’s College at Mango Hill, while Ziggy pursued architectural projects and art commissions with Catholic and secular benefactors. The couple’s most recent sacred art project was renovating the sanctuary space at St Flannan’s Church, Zillmere.
Zillmere parish priest Fr Rafal Rucinski, who has been close to Ziggy and Lucy since 2001, said Ziggy walked into the church, looked around, and immediately said, “The corner behind the altar disturbs everything”.
The church has an unusual L-shape structure, as it was a repurposed school building. The main concern Ziggy had was that the sanctuary sat at the far corner of the L-shape, which made the sanctuary feel distant to the congregation.
Fr Rucinski told Ziggy the parish had planned on renovations soon anyway and entrusted it to his artistic eye.
The first change was closing off the recessed corner of the L-shape with a wall to make the back of the sanctuary more prominent and push forward the visual perspective for the congregation. They redesigned the tabernacle space with an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary beneath the Southern Cross watching over the tabernacle. The ambo moved closer to the altar and the central crucifix was repositioned with an added light effect.
Fr Rucinski said he had received that crucifix as a gift from a woman who recovered it from another church after it was thrown away. “The way Ziggy installed the crucifix is beautiful,” Fr Rucinski said.
He said a parishioner had also commented that the new design added “as many overhead screens as possible, as big as possible without distracting or disrupting us from the reason we gather”. “I like that comment,” Fr Rucinski said with a laugh.
Fr Rucinski said the redesign had brought more people to the church too.
“I think if you create a space where people are feeling comfortable to pray, they will use that space,” he said. “There are many more people coming to pray at the church than there used to be.”
Lucy has recently been working on a restoration project of a crucifix for the Pauline Fathers Monastery at Marian Valley. The faded crucifix had arrived at their door with Christ’s wounds barely visible. It had been transformed under Lucy’s brush into a gruesome and powerful depiction of Christ crucified.
Lucy said the icons she wrote for Stella Maris Church, Maroochydore, remained her favourite pieces of sacred art.
“Whenever we’re going to the Sunshine Coast and plan to participate at any churches on the coast, I always say to Ziggy, ‘Let’s go to Stella Maris’,” Lucy said.
She said being with the icons gave her peace.
“I just want to be in that place,” she said. “I spent a lot of time on them and I am sort of attached to them.”
It was not just Lucy who felt that way, but also a visiting priest from Melbourne who happened to be a guest staying with parish priest Fr Joe Duffy at the time.
“He (the visiting priest) was sitting and praying in front of the icon of Mary and something happened – we don’t know – but then he said, ‘I love it, I’ll pay for it’, so he basically sponsored the painting,” Lucy said.
For Ziggy, his most profound experience came from the mystery of a then-unfamiliar saint. He and Lucy were at an Easter Vigil Mass and when the Litany of the Saints called out for the intercession of “St Catherine” of Siena, Ziggy was overcome with emotion.
“Honestly, it was really powerful,” he said. “When I heard St Catherine of Siena, I just started to cry and I was shaking and I was saying, ‘What? What is it? Who are you? What do you want from me?’”
When he got home, he Googled her name and started to dive into the story of the mystic saint. Within a few days, Ziggy received a call from Stella Maris parish with an art commission to design a sculpture of St Catherine of Siena for a parish school.
“I started to feel connected to her (St Catherine),” he said. “I connect to her very strongly even today. Every day, every prayer… there is a part of prayer that is always through her. She is really a very powerful lady in my life.”
Even so, Ziggy said he was still waiting for the Lord to call on him for a project where he could fully express his craft.
“I’m always asking, ‘Lord, why not? Why am I note able to do this?” he said. “It’s very difficult sometimes.”
He said he would love to do the Stations of the Cross on a backdrop of the cobblestone road of Jerusalem.
With the pandemic, work has been slow for artists, but Ziggy and Lucy remain hopeful – they know miracles happen.
“In 1979, during the first visit of John Paul II to Poland , he was praying very strongly, ‘And I cry out from the depths of this millennium – let your Spirit descend and renew the face of the earth. The face of this land,” Lucy said. “Shortly after, in 1980, the Solidarity movement, which brought the end of communism in Poland, was born.”
If you would like to find out more about their portfolio, you can contact Ziggy and Lucy at ziggy@lzart.com.au
