Emerging Sydney artist prays while cutting artistic legacy of holy modern art and World Youth Day Sydney 2008
By Bridget Spinks
National Reporter
Sitting on the University of Notre Dame Australia’s Sydney campus grounds is a two-metre tall, larger than life mosaic of Our Lady Seat of Wisdom, freshly made by Sydney-based emerging artist Christopher Wolter, a former Dominican seminarian.
The work is based on the original Sedes Sapientiae (Seat of Wisdom) icon commissioned by Pope John Paul II in 2000 and made by Slovenian Jesuit artist and theologian, Fr Marko Ivan Rupnik.
Pope John Paul II was to gift this production of Sancta Maria Sedes Sapientiae to the university students of the world.
Since its completion, this icon has travelled to various countries including Greece, Spain and Ireland and last year, in the wake of World Youth Day in 2008, it travelled Australia, touring youth ministries and university chaplaincies on the west coast in August.
While the Rupnik original of Sancta Maria, Sedes Sapientiae travelled around the nation, Chris Wolter began work on his icon in May. He chipped and cut to size one centimetre glass squares and fragments for his holy work of art until it was completed in December.
On close inspection, Chris’ icon has a different colour palette to the Rupnik original. And it is bigger too.
“It was entirely my own rendition but I stuck to the basic proportions and iconography. I changed the shape of the hands, nose and mouth but kept the same proportions,” Wolter, 36, said of his mosaic.
Chris would often pray while cutting, grouting and tiling together the image of Our Lady and Our Lord.
“Working on the icon itself was a thing of great piety,” he said. "I would constantly stop and say prayers like the Rosary or litanies to Our Lady, and I found it a very prayerful exercise. Often, things would fall into place in such a way that it seemed almost supernatural.
“And I’d stop and think, ‘where did that come from? I didn’t do that’; things would take form without any conscious intellectual effort on my part.”
Italian renaissance artists, Fra Angelico and Botticelli, because of his “great piety – you can see his love for Our Lady in his artwork," are Chris’ role models, as well as unknown artists from the Romanesque and Medieval periods “who gave so much for so little fame and probably little money”.
“I think art should praise God because beautiful things do, by their nature, give glory to God. Whether we believe in God or not, we aspire to something greater when we perceive the beautiful. What I wanted to make was something beautiful that makes your heart sing when you look at it,” he said of the finished icon.
While Chris was artist-in-residence at the University of Notre Dame in first semester last year, he was called on by the vice chancellor and deputy vice chancellor to produce a feasibility report for the production of another Sancta Maria Sedes Sapientiae to be based on the Rupnik original. In the report, Chris also included a proposal of his own.
Before he knew it, he was commissioned by Cardinal George Pell of Sydney to begin work on the icon that would be gifted to the University of Notre Dame Australia. The glass tiles came from Italy and China but the pink fragments came from a large chunk of amethyst crystal that one of his friends, who had been praying for the success of the icon, had donated. “The shade of pink was perfect; fragments have been incorporated into areas around Our Lady’s eyes, Our Lord’s eyes and both their lips,” he said.
In 2009, Wolter was a fresh National Art School graduate. But he also brings to his art and to his first major commission several years of education and experience gained while discerning a vocation in the Dominican seminary from 1999 to 2004.
“That theological formation and immersion in the prayer life of the Church while in the Dominican formation programme feeds my identity as a Catholic artist. For example, I still pray the Office, go to daily Mass as well as pray daily Rosary and other pious devotions," he said.
And while he feels that making this mosaic has been an endorsement of him as an emerging artist, being a Catholic artist does have its challenges.
"I think that practising Catholic artists in today’s society are caught between a rock and a hard place,” he said.
“On the one hand there’s the contemporary art world which the Church should be able to find a ground and means in which to communicate and dialogue with, but so often it seems to fall into the trap of merely taking on existing styles which in themselves seem incompatible with Catholic culture. And on the other hand there is the mass produced kitsch.
“These days you won’t get someone who can sculpt like Michelangelo or paint faces like Bouguereau (a 19th century French salon painter).
“We need to find ways that work within the traditional framework without being a slave to it, [to make works] that are beautiful and yet appealing to the modern eye.”
For Chris, the idea behind his production of Our Lady Seat of Wisdom was “to use the iconography of Our Lady Seat of Wisdom but [for it] to be a mosaic artwork in its own right”. His goal in making the mosaic icon was “to give glory to God”, he said.
The task took him longer than he expected; this was his first mosaic in ten years and his first large-scale mosaic at that.
To fit in part-time work with the University of Notre Dame’s campus maintenance staff, Chris scheduled himself three days a week to work on the mosaic, but things didn’t always go to plan.
“Some days I didn’t do anything on it and other days I’d get so immersed in it, I wouldn’t sleep and go through the night,” he said.
“Things would start to take shape and form; I’d keep going on that. I’d get tired and think ‘I should walk away’ but I’d see something else to do, and do it.”
In his experience making religious art, which has included repainting statues, producing original paintings as well as the making of this icon, Chris said his faith nourishes the work, but it also “makes me want to be holier myself … and I am conscious of my unworthiness before God yet grateful for his gift of creative talent”.
With the mosaic now complete, Chris’ next commissioned projects include some charcoal cityscapes, and the design of the Episcopal Coat of Arms of the new Bishop of Parramatta, Bishop Anthony Fisher OP.
“As for religious art, I have an idea for a crucifix mix media painting. I’d also like to paint portraits of up and coming blesseds and saints, namely Mary MacKillop and Cardinal Newman.”
While the papal icon and model for Chris Wolter’s work which toured Australia last year has now been returned to Rome, an arresting image of Our Lady Seat of Wisdom remains behind on campus.
Convenor of the University of Sydney’s Catholic chaplaincy and of the Sydney Archdiocesan university chaplaincies, Daniel Hill said the new icon on campus “will make a real statement to anybody going to the university about the foundation for what university studies is all about – [namely], the whole idea that studies at university are based upon an idea that wisdom is something that we strive for constantly”.
“And wisdom is found through imitating Our Lady. And true wisdom is a really a person, and that person is Christ,” Daniel said.