Artists statement

'For we are young and free' borrows from the second line of the Australian anthem. The phrase speaks to a national perception of a shared identity and politic. As a nation-state, we are relatively young, and politically we see ourselves as having all the freedoms and self-determination associated with a liberal democracy. The work is a manually embroidered depiction of an Australian soldier in Afghanistan. I have deliberately obscured his eyes and changed the colour of the uniform to keep his identity anonymous, and his portrayal symbolic. The work is not about the specific identity of any one soldier, but about what that soldier represents, and how those collective actions relate to the national identity. What does our liberty mean, when our surrogates are explicitly involved in illiberal, destructive actions in other places? What does it do to the agents, and what does it do to those we inflict our agents on? For many in Australia our military is a symbol of authority and security, but only being militarily engaged in invasive wars oversea, anyone who comes across our soldiers in action would only see them as an existential threat.