Artist Transformed

Intermountain Catholic

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Cache Valley and Utah State University Sculptor Eileen Doktorski stands in the new St. Thomas Aquinas Parish Church in Hyde Park. The crucifix, which Doktorski created, marks a journey of faith which was assisted, she said, by Pastor Father Clarence Sandoval, the Parish MOMS group, and parish and Newman Club members who supported her. Her students and graduate student Adam Bradshaw, project assistant, added their efforts to the massive project. IC photo by Barbara Stinson Lee

HYDE PARK — When Utah State University Professor of Sculpture Eileen Doktorski, a member of St. Thomas Aquinas Parish, Logan, kissed her husband good-bye one day four years ago, she had no idea he was leaving her and her then-two-year-old daughter.

"I can understand how he could leave me," Doktorski said in a July 13 interview with the Intermountain Catholic. "But how could he leave his beautiful daughter without even saying good-bye?"

Totally unprepared for divorce and single parenthood, Doktorski began gathering all the strength and resources she had. This strong, gifted woman, who’d earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the Parsons School of Design in Manhattan, N.Y., a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts from the Yale School of Art in New Haven, Conn., and was a Fulbright Scholar at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland, found herself dispirited and depressed. She struggled to get out of bed each morning, and every day brought more change, more challenge, and more heartache.

"I was on a painful journey I neither sought nor wanted," she said.

Doktorski, who was raised in a Catholic family and is committed to raising her daughter, Paisley, a Catholic, was still deeply wounded when she approached St. Thomas Aquinas Parish Pastor Father Clarence Sandoval in spring, 2005, about the parish’s need for a crucifix for the new church and his vision for the crucifix.

"I had never sculpted religious art before beyond restoring a madonna once," Doktorski said. "I’d hear Fr. Clarence was looking for a crucifix with a life-size corpus that would really show the suffering and torment Jesus endured, and that he wanted original art for the new church. The parish has been so kind to me in the past three years that I wanted to give something of my talent, my gift, back, so, with Fr. Clarence’s counsel and advice, I started the journey.

"I saw in the cross someone else’s suffering, and it took me out of my own," she said. "It gave me a place where I could cry, and it deepened both my spirituality and my feeling of interconnectedness with others and with the world."

Doktorski’s style of sculpture is life casting, and she’s specialized in the subjects of grief, violence, and emotional conflict. She began delving again into everything she knew about art history. She studied crucifixion and its effects on the human body, and she spent hours meditating before the crucifix in St. Jerome Chapel, the site of the old St. Thomas Aquinas Church.

"It seems contemporary artists aren’t doing religious art very much any more," she said. "A lot of art is related to it, but it’s a step outside.

"I knew I needed God, and I know the crucifix is the focal point of every Catholic church. It’s one of the most compelling images in all of art. I’ve seen many crucifixes in churches here and abroad. But this was the first time I was able to identify with the torture Jesus endured, the isolation he underwent; the openness and acceptance with which he approached his passion without knowing what was coming next."

Out of her contemplation on the crucifix in the St. Jerome Chapel came Doctorski’s desire to maintain the tension of life in the corpus on the new cross.

The sculptor began doing preliminary work – seeking models to pose for the corpus, selecting the perfect medium from which the corpus would be cast (she settled on alginate, the material used by dentists to make tooth molds), which she would then cover with plaster, then cast in bronze. She made sketches of models in various poses and submitted them to the parish committee overseeing the crucifix project and Fr. Sandoval.

"It wasn’t always easy to ask a person if they would pose for Christ," she said, "especially if the crucifix and the crucifixion were outside their personal faith tradition. I ended up using three models. I was blessed to have been able to get a Jewish man I know to model for the face and head of Jesus. That was important. Another man modeled for the torso and legs of Jesus, and another for the hands."

Doktorski said she wanted the crucifix to move people and to relate, especially, the words of Christ: "Father, why have you forsaken me?"

"Clearly, in this crucifix, Jesus is man, and at this moment, he is abandoned," she said. "In my prayers before the crucifix, I determined that I wanted people to delve back into their own personal suffering and relate to Jesus."

Another result of her contemplation was her resolve to use a tree from the Cache National Forest for the wood of the cross. That aspect of the project expanded the number of the people working on the crucifix ten-fold, and forced Doktorski to do something that made her uncomfortable clear to her core; ask for help.

"I was changing," she said.

Until this time on the massive project, Doctorski had relied on the help of only Adam Bradshaw, her graduate student assistant. But now, they had to find, acquire permission to cut, and transport the perfect tree from which to make the cross, and it would prove to be a huge undertaking.

It took Doktorski, Bradshaw, eight members of the parish, six members of the Newman Club, and four of Doktorski’s students to accomplish the task. The images of a parish carrying its heavy cross through several feet of snow, and strangers stepping in to help carry the cross was not lost on the artist.

Logan woodworker George Hessenthaler of Urban Forest Woodworks joined the project fully when the truck with the tree pulled up in front of his shop to be cut.

"He invited me to use his shop to put the pieces of the crucifix together, because it offered much more working space than my studio," Doktorski said. "It was a real gift, and he was a tremendous help. In the end, if one single person had been missing, it wouldn’t have happened."

In retrospect, Doktorski, said, she has a great deal to be thankful for. The crucifix project not only created a beautiful work of liturgical art, it was an experience of growth and self-discovery for her.

"I feel there is much suffering and conflict in the world and art can have a part in lifting people up when they are recovering from loss," she said. "Recognizing that everyone, regardless of religious faith, experiences a range of feelings from joy to pain, helped me create a sculpture that would move all open to viewing it. I envisioned a Christ figure evoking strong emotion and inspiring in worshipers a great compassion for others.

"I experience great joy in life, but do not feel the need for spiritual comfort during such times. It is when I recall moments of loss and struggle that I look most to God and to art to take me outside my own pain.

"I feel a greater interconnection to all of humanity and the universe when I am moved and inspired by great works of art. I feel my own spirituality and understanding of God is best expressed through my art."