Shaun Gladwell: Afghanistan

Shaun Gladwell’s war art focuses on ordinary soldiers in harsh landscapes, on their physique, their inner world, and the training and rituals that shape them. The subjects depicted here, whether on military bases in Afghanistan, the Middle East or Australia, lie at the centre of the artist’s meditations on the role of technology in modern war and the nature of sacrifice and death. Gladwell’s work is a significant contribution to a tradition of official war art that began during the First World War. His use of the video medium is the first in the history of the Australian War Memorial’s official war art scheme.