Model-turned-philanthropist leads art program after cancer journey
Lisa Seiffert’s breast cancer diagnosis inspires an uplifting art program at the very hospital that treated her.
In the months before the pandemic hit, Lisa Seiffert was preparing to open a gallery in Brooklyn with her friend, neighbour and master printer David Frawley. The idea was to spotlight analog film photography, Frawley being one of the old guard photographic printers who worked with the likes of Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Hiro, Herb Ritts and Brigitte Lacombe.
An exhibition of Lacombe’s work was going to be their debut show together and the Australian model’s art world arrival after leaving our shores at 16 years old for the Big Apple off the back of her first Vogue Australia cover, shot by James Houston.
In New York Seiffert initially moved in with her agent Katie Ford’s family to find her sea legs for the modelling industry, which would see her traversing the globe for the next 20 years shooting with the likes of Peter Lindbergh, Estée Lauder and even starring in a Robbie Williams music video.
As New York City locked down and friends fled Manhattan, Seiffert bunkered in, not wanting her “ride or die” – a 14-year-old dachshund named Atlas – to have to endure the long flight home, followed by weeks in quarantine. Time blurred and darkness engulfed the city. Seiffert began selling her designer clothes online and cancelled her private health insurance believing the end was nigh.
On November 22, 2021, her beloved Atlas passed away, lying on her chest, and by July of 2022, Seiffert decided it was time to book that visit home. She landed just days before the start of the Brisbane to Hamilton Island Yacht Race, in which the avid sailor was competing with her dad, Adrian Seiffert, who co-owns a 100-footer. The goal of the trip was to see if she was good enough to join him for the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race later that year, but with her Brooklyn loft sitting empty, and her first art show still months away, Seiffert decided to stay on and spend as much time as possible on the water.
While visiting her dad at home in Brisbane that October, she found herself with time on her hands and, walking through David Jones, decided to stop at the BreastScreen clinic. Her mum Val Seiffert lost her own sister Shirley to breast cancer at 51, so her daughter was vigilant with testing from the age of 35 but let her regular testings slide during the pandemic.
In November 2022, Seiffert was diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer. The first mammogram missed it, but the one-centimetre lump in her right breast was later picked up on ultrasound, and biopsied on the spot.
“The technician knew,” the 41-year-old recalls, now nursing a cup of English breakfast at her local, bills in Darlinghurst. “I saw her face go pale and long, she called other people in, and it seemed very urgent. I was like, ‘What are the chances of this coming back as breast cancer?’. She was like, ‘It’ll be miraculous if it doesn’t’.”
Seiffert’s mum flew in from her home in the Whitsundays for the next appointment. “I remember walking down the hallway of the hospital and I was like, ‘My life is never going to be the same after I come out of that room’. We walked out of the hospital after getting the diagnosis and she hugged me and said, ‘Lisa, I wish it was me’.” Then we bawled our eyes out in the parking lot.
“But I got very lucky; it was slow-growing. We hit the ground running. I got an appointment with [oncologist] Dr Sarah Forsyth the following week. And then all I could worry about was doing the f***ing Sydney to Hobart, because I thought I may be dying, so I was like, ‘If I’m going to go out, I want to go out doing the Sydney to Hobart’,” she laughs.
Seiffert’s surgery was scheduled for November 23, 2022. As she was being wheeled in, she realised it was exactly a year on from Atlas’s passing.
“We share a very strange and bittersweet ‘cancer’ anniversary,” she sighs. “The same day of Atlas’s passing from cancer, a year later to the day, I was having my cancer removed. If it wasn’t for Atlas passing … I always think how much longer I would’ve waited or put off the mammogram. He’s my little guardian angel.”
The operation was a success, and on December 2, 2022, Seiffert was declared cancer free. By month’s end she had completed her first Sydney to Hobart. “They made that happen,” she says in praise of the incredible staff at Sydney’s Royal Hospital for Women, where she was treated. “When I was in the hospital, a lot of the time I was by myself because my family is in Queensland. People were like, ‘Why aren’t you doing it in Queensland?’. But I had already done all the tests, picked my oncologist, so I did a lot of appointments on my own, which was really quite challenging, emotionally and mentally.”
Her experience, now almost 18 months on, led Seiffert to spearhead an ambitious, philanthropic art program for the Randwick hospital that cared for her during her darkest hours.
“The Royal was there for me in my absolute time of need and this is my way of giving back,” Seiffert says. “I would be alone looking around the treatment room while they’re injecting me with five needles, and there’s nothing … there’s nowhere to hide, nowhere to escape to. The walls were bare and stark, with the occasional medical diagram, I would have loved something to take my mind away from what was happening.”
A big idea was born: “I think I was probably on pain meds when I had this grandiose idea. And I really truly thought, ‘I can do this! There’s no reason why this hospital shouldn’t have art’.”
Her oncologist emailed the Royal Hospital for Women Foundation on her behalf. “Then bam, they’re like, ‘Yes, we would love her to do this’. And then I was like, ‘Oh … I don’t even know anyone here! I’m the last person that should be taking on this task’.”
But she did and the project soon attracted the support of gallerist Tim Olsen and now features the work of her friend James Houston, Nada Herman, Charles Davis, Otis Hope Carey, Mark Squires and Alesandro Ljubicic, whose work now adorns an entire wall at the hospital where his two children were born.
“Lisa’s noble art initiative to enhance places that are often part of facing our greatest fears and mortality is understanding all these aspects through the role of creativity,” says Olsen. “To facilitate a visually rich environment provides a momentary reprieve. I congratulate Lisa, who from her own experience of health despair has considered how she can help to minimise the suffering of others through art. It is a great act of hope.”
More often than not, serendipity played a part. Seiffert met landscape painter Belynda Henry, who she had long respected, at a friend’s Halloween party, but had no idea who she was chatting to until she saw her post on Instagram days later. She also enlisted Australian retailer Nick Scali to furnish calming nooks and seating spaces.
“The program not only benefits the patients, family members and friends of patients, but the doctors, nurses, lab technicians and cleaners – all they’re doing is giving back,” she reinforces. “It really, really warms me to know that I can make a tiny difference.”
“I met Lisa when she was diagnosed,” says her oncologist Sarah Forsyth. “It was obviously a huge shock, but she showed remarkable strength, positivity and resilience. And she has directed this positive energy and drive into the Art For Healing Program.”
“The Royal Hospital for Women is unique – women are seen, validated and supported through their health journeys. The nurturing care and medical expertise is outstanding, though the hospital in many areas is aged and untouched from the original build in 1997,” adds Elise Jennings, Royal Hospital for Women Foundation general manager. “Despite staff, patients and visitors seeing beyond the physical, we feel strongly that women deserve better and there is substantial research that demonstrates the benefit and impact of environment on health and healing.”
Seiffert herself believes completely in the power of art to heal. “It’s medicine,” she says. “I’ve been doing tons of research on the benefits. It makes labour shorter, makes hospital stays shorter.”
Following her own surgery came 19 rounds of radiotherapy. After each treatment, Seiffert would walk 20 minutes to McIver’s Ladies Baths in Coogee, which became her refuge; the saltwater healing her body and grounding her thoughts. “I just got through it,” she smiles. “But again, everyone in these places bends over backwards and goes above and beyond in their duties. Like, Tom Cruise walks past, I roll my eyes. But my oncologist walks past, I get starstruck.”
She remains on a drug treatment plan. “I had to freeze my eggs three times,” she shares. “I want to have a baby, but now I have to be on these meds for five years, and I can’t,” she laments, pointing to the complications surrounding surrogacy in Australia.
“It’s pretty shit. My reasoning is medical. The meds I’m on stop my cancer from coming back by 50 per cent. That’s really important. And especially for the next two years, I should be on them, because that’s when I’m more susceptible.”
The emotional fallout continues: “It makes you up and down,” she says of the medication. “And it can make you severely depressed. I’ve halved my dosage. I wasn’t depressed, but it would scramble my brain, and I couldn’t put a sentence together. I couldn’t function. They took me off them for six weeks, to make sure that’s what was making me so scattered, and it was. It makes everything harder.”
But that’s certainly not to say that the infectiously positive woman sitting across the table isn’t extremely grateful to be where she is today. “I feel like this is where I’m meant to be,” she nods, confirming her ambition is to take the art program national.
And as for her former life in the US? “It’s just not an option really,” she says, referring to what would be deemed a “pre-existing medical condition” if she were to return to New York. “This country is blessed with its healthcare,” she adds of Australia’s Medicare system. “Health is wealth. I’m so sick of seeing perfection that’s not real. Everyone goes through hard times.
“Even today, I’m still adjusting to having everything flipped upside down … where I live, my friends, my dog. It’s just been a lot. I’m still mourning my life [in New York] because it happened so fast, and I didn’t have time to process that. But I believe everything happens for a reason, and I believe I was meant to be diagnosed here.”
She smiles: “Now I’m the person that’s starting an art program, and that’s massive. It’s like my art gallery in New York, except different. It was going to be the coolest gallery ever in New York. Anyway … just move on. I’m rolling with the punches.
To find out more or to make a donation visit royalwomen.org.au/art-for-healing
This story is from the April issue of WISH.
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