Siri Hendrata

My practice spans sculpture, mixed media and drawing to form dialogues with Australian perceptions of and relationships with our armed forces military apparatuses. Generated from family histories intersected by colonial and imperialist violence and years spent as an Air Force cadet, I recall embodied experience, moving away from absolute forms and using abstraction to contend with the complex intersections of self and the war machine. Referencing the landscapes and iconography of 21st century conflicts that shape the public imagination, my practice deconstructs the architectures of modern war and relationships to violently marked land. My work takes the shape of distorted figurative structures assembled from military surplus and urban detritus, emulating the tools of tactical camouflage and dealing with the realities of the bunker and beleaguered body.