I was born in Melbourne, Australia, into a Polish Catholic family - carrying those roots into a city far from where they came from. My formative years were at All Hallows, a Catholic school where the church was not incidental but central. I remember the wooden carved Stations of the Cross on the walls there - fourteen of them, worn smooth, standing in the half-dark. I did not think of them then as art. They were just there, the way walls are there. But they stayed with me.

Churches have stayed with me ever since - through decades of travel, across Europe, Asia, China. I am drawn to them for two reasons I have never fully separated: their architecture, and what that architecture does to the body. The way stone compresses sound into something that feels like weight. The way light behaves differently inside them. The way silence in a church is not the absence of sound but a presence of its own.

In 2008 I was selected as a Hasselblad Master. The theme that year was Passion. I went into my studio and made the Stations of the Cross. It was, I understand now, a re-engagement - not just with a subject but with something older in me. Polish, Catholic, formed in Melbourne, drawn all my life to sacred spaces. The project felt inevitable once I began it.

Now, in 2026, I am working as a resident at La Chapelle Saint-Antoine on the island of Naxos in Greece - a former Venetian monastery from the early 17th century, in the oldest part of the city of Chora. Next to the residency is a small chapel, the Agios Antonios, in a state of beautiful decay. I was moved by it immediately - the stone, the scale, the silence, the sense of centuries of prayer concentrated in a very small space. It is exactly the kind of place these images and this music were made for.

This is what brought me back to the original series. Not nostalgia. A recognition that the work was unfinished - and that the next chapter belongs not in a studio but in a chapel, with real voices, in real stone.

WHAT THIS CAMPAIGN FUNDS

This campaign funds the next phase of Via Dolorosa: travel to a stone chapel in Poland to record selected pieces live with human musicians - the Coda, Station I, and Station V - transcribed, arranged and performed in the acoustic space the compositions were written for. The recordings will form the master source for the vinyl LP. The live performance will be documented on video and audio.

BUDGET (AUD $8,000)

Travel and accommodation to Poland: $1,300

Chapel location recording session: $900

Musician transcription and arrangement fees: $1,600

Rehearsal costs: $500

Live performance documentation - video and audio: $800

Vinyl LP mastering and pressing (200 copies): $2,000

Fees and contingency: $900

WHAT YOU RECEIVE

Donors of $50 AUD and above will receive regular updates and digital audio files as each piece is completed - to listen to as the work unfolds.

Donors of $150 AUD and above will receive a signed edition print from the Via Dolorosa series.

Donors of $1,000 AUD and above will receive the complete set of 12 images from the series.

When the album is finished and pressed, all donors will have first opportunity to purchase before public release.