00:00 I am very interested in the choices we make as a community.
00:04 And what I mean by that, things like I've made work about refugee and asylum seeker policy.
00:10 I'm an Australian of second generation and first generation migrants.
00:18 My mum, for instance, her family came from Egypt, fleeing the authoritarian regime of Abdel Nasser.
00:26 I was very influenced by being raised by uncles and aunts who said,
00:32 "I'd be grateful for the peace and opportunity and prosperity that you have here. There's no bombs over here."
00:37 What is the best way I can contribute to my world?
00:42 Expressing these ideas in many mediums, but my preference is for a very natural material of marble.
00:49 With this particular project, there are so many different stories of veterans' experiences of service and the aftermath.
00:59 There are many different types of mental and physical trauma involved in the brief, so many stories of that.
01:08 What I see as one of the common denominators through the stories is that blood, sweat and tears
01:14 so many different veterans and their families and their loved ones and carers have all experienced in different ways.
01:23 There's so many different scars that our veterans have, whether they're visible or not.
01:28 And I started to think, well, those blood, sweat and tears, I started to think of the droplet form.
01:33 But in this case, I wanted something simple and the droplet form to stand in for, as a proxy for those blood, sweat and tears.
01:43 And what transformed into marble was just appealed because then you could have something that was in tension,
01:48 the tension of the droplet, but also had a fragility, but also because I think it's made to be physically experienced,
01:55 not just looked at in photographs.
01:57 [MUSIC]
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