Leopoldine Mimovich

Leopoldine Mimovich (née Deflorian) OAM, also known as "Poldi" (June 25, 1920 – December 25, 2019), was an Austro-Australian liturgical artist, sculptor, etcher, brazier, carver, painter, illustrator and printmaker.

[3][4] Mimovich was born in 1920, the second of five children in a devoutly Catholic family, and spent her childhood in Sankt Johann in the Pongau region of the First Republic of Austria (currently Neumarkt, Italy).

Her parents recognised her artistic potential early, but could not afford to send her to art school, so she worked throughout her teens as an apprentice to her father Franz Deflorian, an interior decorator.

[7] When their luggage arrived a fortnight later, she bargained one of her two carved masks with an official at the training centre to transfer to the Royal Park Migrant Camp in Melbourne earlier than scheduled.

[7] The couple purchased a house in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne where she set up her studio and undertook commissions reflecting her Austrian traditions and Catholic background.

[10] Over the decades she has received commissions for many religious and secular sculptures for churches, parks and public buildings in Australia, Germany, Honolulu, Japan, Korea, London, New Guinea, Timor-Leste, and the United States.

In the later years of her career Mimovich was hampered by a lung condition related to wood dust,[6] and when she was no longer able to sculpt, she started painting icons.