Blood, sweat and tears: War Memorial to pay permanent tribute to soldiers and their families

The Canberra Times

Artist Alex Seton created an unusual new contemporary artwork, For Every Drop Shed in Anguish, made of 18 "droplets" of marble, representing the blood, sweat, and tears shed by those in service and their families.

Transcript

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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