Daniel Gleeson: Good evening everyone, and a very warm welcome rather to the National Library of Australia. I'm Daniel Gleeson and I'm the Director of Community Engagement here. Now, before we begin, just take a moment to check that your mobile phone is on silent, because there's nothing worse than hearing the phone go off, looking around in horror, and then you realise it's me. I would like to acknowledge the Ngunnawal people as the traditional owners of the land on which we work and live. I pay my respects to their elders both past and present and emerging.

Now, this is a wonderful event and it all came about when Luke came into the Library to drop off some copies of the new art book, 'ELK The Stencil Art of Luke Cornish'. Now under Australian law, copies of every publication published in Australia must be lodged here with the National Library so that we can maintain the national collection and make it available to all Australians. So Luke came into the Library, and I must say I was very excited to meet him As a young adult. I always enjoyed seeing ELK stencil artworks appearing in various places around Canberra, and I was very excited to meet the man behind the moniker.

I'm not an art expert, so I speak as a lifelong Canberra resident when I say that through his art, Luke has made a significant contribution to the cultural life of this city during his early career. The powers that be in Canberra soon cottoned onto the fact that public art can enliven a city and its culture. Canberra today has a wide variety of corporate and publicly funded street art. But when Luke was doing his early work, it was in a much more difficult environment.So when I 

got the chance to meet Luke and he expressed an interest in launching the book here, we jumped at the chance. It's my pleasure to introduce Luke Cornish, who has risen to become Australia's most acclaimed stencil artist. Luke's art blends technical mastery, which results in near photorealistic images, with his deep social commentary.

Luke is a four-time Archibald prize finalist. He has won many awards, including the coveted Holding Redlich People's Choice Award in 2017, the Churchill Fellowship in 2013, and he was a finalist in the Sulman Prize in that same year in 2012. Cornish's short film 'Me-We', which documented the process and construction of his portrait of Father Bob McGuire for entry into the 2012 Archibald Prize was shortlisted at the prestigious Tropfest Film Festival.

Luke is joined in conversation tonight by Kate Fielding. Kate is the CEO of A New Approach, Australia's national arts and culture think tank. Prior to her role with A New Approach, Kate was the chair of the Goldfields-Esperance Development Commission based in Kalgoorlie in Western Australia. Kate was also a member of the Board of the Australia Council for the Arts. She's been the Chair of Regional Arts Australia and of Country Arts WA, and was named one of the 40 under 40 WA business leaders in 2017.

But we also have a special guest here tonight, respected art historian Ken McGregor, who has written this beautiful book. Ken is a prolific Australian author, curator, and arts advocate whose body of written work is deeply rooted in the visual arts, particularly contemporary and indigenous Australian art. Now, I did a quick catalogue search and here at the Library we have 37 different books written by Ken, many of which are richly illustrated monographs like the one tonight, which is a remarkable achievement. So towards the end of her discussion with Luke, Kate will invite Ken to join their discussion.

Because of this format and there being so much material to get through, we won't have time for questions at the end, but I know that Luke, Ken, and Kate will be available upstairs after the event where they can answer any questions you may have. Please welcome Luke Cornish and Kate Fielding.

Kate Fielding: Hey everyone.

Luke Cornish: Hello.

Kate Fielding: Anyone in the room been to Kalgoorlie? Stick your hand up. Hey, there's a few people here. Is there any geographic checks you want to do here?

Luke Cornish: Syria?

Kate Fielding: Anyone been to Syria? Excellent. Has anyone, any Canberrans here? Anyone who grew up in Canberra? Yay. Anyone who loves living in Canberra. Yay. Alright, thanks for participating in our informal mic check. I really appreciate that. Can you all now final one, can you all hear us? What about Luke?

Luke Cornish: Can you hear me?

Kate Fielding: Yes. Terrific. Thank you so much. So I have had a sneak peek at the what's about to happen, and it is excellent. We are going to have a great time together tonight. Thank you for being here. Luke, there is something very poetic about launching a book about your work here at the National Library in the place where you were a stacky.

Luke Cornish: I was.

Kate Fielding: What does it feel like to be back here in the Library and back here in Canberra? Tell us a bit about your time in Canberra and your time here at the Library.

Luke Cornish: It's nice to be invited back if you dunno what a stacky is, people come in and borrow books and piece of paper gets down the tube and someone in the dungeon going, we'll go and find the book in acres and acres of bookshelves. And that's what I did for about two weeks, I think. So yeah, it is good to come back and be allowed on the upper floors of the Library. But I've got to say it wasn't the worst job I ever had. Excellent. It was probably the first job I ever had where I was given the autonomy to just do the job without anyone looking over my shoulder.

Kate Fielding: That's a pretty excellent thing to have within a job, I reckon.

Luke Cornish: I think so, yeah.

Kate Fielding: So what about before then? So you grew up in Canberra.

Luke Cornish: I grew up in Canberra.

Kate Fielding: I'm giving you a cute lead in there to changing the slide.

Luke Cornish: I grew up in Canberra.

Kate Fielding: How cute is he?

Luke Cornish: Yeah, I grew up in Canberra. I went to Miles Franklin Primary School, Melbourne High School, and Daramalen for a couple of years in between. Yeah. What more can you say?

Kate Fielding: I mean, you don't need to say anything more. That's just a slide.

Luke Cornish: Says a thousand words. It's my neurodivergence summed up in one photo.

Kate Fielding: Right there. Alright, so once you'd grown up a little, take us back to the early 2000s.

Luke Cornish: Early 2000s. I'd started making, had I started making art at that point? I very much was looking for a creative outlet around that time because I was working menial jobs, not here other places, menial jobs.

Kate Fielding: What were those jobs?

Luke Cornish: They usually revolved around cement, whether that was.

Kate Fielding: It is Canberra.

Luke Cornish: Bricklaying, brick labouring, rendering. It was always getting up at five in the morning. And these frosty mornings, it's the first time I've seen frost today in about 15 years. And mixing cement all day. So I was craving something. I think I was just trying to get my head around at that age, there has to be more to life than just showing up here and getting paid to do this thing. And I can't go home until the thing is done forever. So there's got to be more.

Kate Fielding: And so what happened next?

Luke Cornish: I became an artist. It was that easy.

Kate Fielding: Oh, great.

Luke Cornish: It was that easy. No, what happened next was I started making art in my spare time. So this piece here is the first painting I ever made. It's a stencil of comedian Bill Hicks, and it has a bit of a line of 'Here's Tom with the weather'. I dunno if you know Bill Hicks, but his comedy was a massive inspiration for me because before I'd found art, I did comedy a few times. Standup comedy.

Kate Fielding: Wow.

Luke Cornish: And that's not a realistic lifestyle. Just as a job. No, it's not for me. I get nervous doing this. Imagine what I'm like doing standup comedy. But I think I was never serious about being a comedian, but I was serious about trying new things and facing my fears, getting outside of my comfort zone. Actually, I came second place in raw comedy. I did okay.

Kate Fielding: You did okay.

Luke Cornish: Yeah.

Kate Fielding: Yeah. I reckon that's pretty impressive in fact.

Luke Cornish: Yeah. But I know I had a can of spray paint and some cardboard and I thought I should do something with that. And that's when I made this, and I remember sort of lifting it up, spray painting it and seeing it and just, I'm onto something there. I really enjoyed that process.
What's next? So that's the first piece I ever sold. That was the first commission I ever did. A couple of friends of mine asked me to do a stencil of their wedding portrait.

Kate Fielding: Beautiful.

Luke Cornish: Which was incredible at the time to be given that opportunity. It's terrible in hindsight. Terrible stencil. That green bit on her hair. What was I thinking?

Kate Fielding: Everyone's a critic, including you of your own work.

Luke Cornish: It's true. You've got to come from somewhere though.

Kate Fielding: So what happened next?

Luke Cornish: What happened next? It was a hard slog. From sitting on your back step with the can spray paint to saying, I want to be a full-time artist. What happened? I started working with a sign company early two thousands, which was kind of, I needed to work. I don't have the luxury of, a lot of my contemporaries don't have that, the same financial pressures that I've got. So I needed to work full time. And I needed to make art full-time. So there was many years of working two full-time jobs. But knowing, well, having the faith in myself that it was going to work out. So I worked very hard for a long time, and in saying that the skills that I took from working for the signwriter just transferred straight into my art practise. So if it wasn't for that job as a sign maker, I don't think my art would've taken off the way that it did because I'm kind of known for my attention to detail. And that's the attention you need to put in when you're making signs. You can't just send it out with shit on it. It has to be perfect.

Kate Fielding: I have so many questions about that attention to detail. We will come to those, but I want to first ask. When, so that transition from it being a thing that was happening kind of on the back step, a thing that was happening as the second full-time job to it becoming right, this is the thing I'm doing. When did you realise it was not a hobby anymore?

Luke Cornish: I think I just started baking small hobby. I started making enough money that I just didn't have to go to work anymore, basically. But I think around that time, John Stanhope was running the ACT and they were just putting so much money into public arts. So I just kept getting these big commission contracts. I got the faces near the fountain in the Canberra Centre, which we're only supposed to be there for three months, but they've been up for nearly 20 years. Wow. It's crazy.

Kate Fielding: So anyway, stick your hand up if you know that work. Yeah,

Luke Cornish: Yeah. I think I got $20,000 for that, which at the time was the most amount of money I ever seen. So I just quit my job because I was rich and I'm not going to have to work again. It didn't last very long, 20,000.

Kate Fielding: It would clearly, the works lasted a long time. Great return on investment for them.

Luke Cornish: Money is long gone. But no, I think there was a difference between making art full time and becoming an exhibiting artist full time, which took a lot longer. I had to go back and work for a few more years to save up, to be in a position to just exhibit. And that was pretty arrogant to think I want to be an exhibiting artist. Maybe not arrogant, but a little bit deluded. It's just growing up in Canberra, I didn't have, you're a public servant or you're a tradie. It was never, they'd say, you can't see it, you can't be it. I wasn't surrounded by artists growing up in Spence. There were none. Well, none that I knew. Anyway.

Kate Fielding: I'm going to call it ambitious.

Luke Cornish: Ambitious.

Kate Fielding: Let's reframe that to ambitious. So you won the People's Choice at Melbourne Stencil Festival? Yes. In 2008, I think. Pardon?

Luke Cornish: 7.

Kate Fielding: 2007, sorry. And then you are in Archibald Prize four years later, maybe three years later.

Luke Cornish: 2012.

Kate Fielding: Yeah, 5 years later. So much math's happening here right now. And you were the first stencil artist in the Archibald Prize?

Luke Cornish:
Yeah.

Kate Fielding: What was that

Luke Cornish: Like? That was scary. I'm not going to lie. Going from, like I said, making that stencil, I think we've missed a couple of photos. That's my stall at the bus depot markets. When I decided that I was going to be a famous artist. And this is the piece that won the People's Choice at the Melbourne Stencil Festival in 2007. It's a homeless guy named Jimmy, who used to sit in the Garema Place. I remember just had these really dirty hands, and I remember being a little bit scared of this guy. He used to play his guitar. One day I just walked up and said, can I take your photo? You're just such an interesting guy. And he just had the sweetest, angelic voice. He was such a sensitive soul. I always felt terrible for the way I judged him on what he looked like. He was just such a lost person.

But I entered that piece into the Melbourne Stencil Festival and first time I'd ever really exhibited my stencils. And it was just so widely accepted. I think it's this kind of pre-internet, internet just coming out. And that's what opened the doors for a lot, especially urban artists, street artists. It went from sort of making a painting and sharing it with your friends to making a painting and sharing it with millions of people. So it was nice to have that feedback.

Kate Fielding:And really, that's kind of the beginning of from there, then growing. And fast forward into being in major  collections, being internationally, in that international space as well. You've exhibited everywhere from Paris to LA.

Luke Cornish: Even now. I'm looking at that painting, looking at the bit that I missed on this.

Kate Fielding: We're going to get to the detailed bit, I promise.

Luke Cornish: Yeah, but I forgot about that bit. So that's the kind of some of the early work that I was doing. And then I had a show in Sydney that was picketed by a group of Christians. They wanted to protest the exhibition because of the content in it, and they applied with the police force, New South Wales Police Force, which was rejected. So all they could do was have a prayer, a mass prayer for my soul. Just fucking weird. So weird.

But this is the Archibald piece. Father Bob. Getting into the Archibald Prize on my first time as a stencil artist, the first stencil artist, street artist ever, to be accepted into that institution. The media had a field day. I was front page of every newspaper, the lead story of every news channel, the banner of news.com for 24 hours. It was terrifying. And it was all good. It was all positive feedback. There was nothing bad about it, but it was just going from making stencils in my shed in Canberra to being at the forefront of the art world. It was kind of like this baptism of fire, of working out how the world really works.

I remember the [unclear] boys used to have this merchandise store in [unclear], and they invited me down and they gave me all this merchandise jumpers and hoodies and t-shirts, and I was like, oh, this is great. You get free stuff. And the next day there's this big post saying Congratulations to our soldier, Luke Cornish, for being accepted in the, I'm not one of your fucking soldiers. But yeah, just having that amount of attention. People want some of it, and they latch on and it's quite unsettling. But at the same time, you get a thick skin. It's kind of like, I don't know if I'm going to explain this well, but when a lobster comes out of its shell, how vulnerable it is for those few days before its skin thickens up. That's kind of how it feels when you're getting that attention.

Kate Fielding: Okay. I've just learned that lobsters go out of their shells. So that face was me trying to process that information.

Luke Cornish: When they eject their shell, they're just a little jelly thing on the bottom of them that hides in its room for a couple of weeks. It's so vulnerable to attack, but you always come out of it stronger. You always come out of it with a thicker skin. So it is nerve wracking having that attention, but you get through it.

Kate Fielding: That sounds like a very useful skill as things kind of escalated and became, gathered momentum having that.

Luke Cornish: Fixed. Yeah, it's a bit easier every time.

Kate Fielding: Yeah. Alright, so I keep promising that we're going to talk about technique and I've got nerdy questions about it, so bear with me. Okay. So explain it to me. You hand cut every stencil with a scalpel. Not with a lobster shell.

Luke Cornish: No, not anymore.

Kate Fielding: Tell me.

Luke Cornish: Originally everything was hand cut, religiously hand cut. That's the way you do it. That's how you make stencils. But I don't have the luxury of spending eight months on a painting these days. I need to start incorporating new technologies. So I'm using laser cutters, which means I can. I always saw it as cheating using laser cutters, but it's really just freed me up to push my career even further or to push my technique even further and explore new things. So I'm using laser cutters now. I still do hand cut sometimes. But hand cut, it was more about escapism for me, really. I never got into art to make money or to be famous. I did it because it was just another drug that I could abuse. It was just, I love the feeling of just getting into that flow state hours and days ago by

Kate Fielding: Beautiful, such healthy living.

Luke Cornish: But now that I'm making money, making money out of something sucks all the fun out of it. So any advice for young artists? Careful what you wish for. No. In all seriousness. Yeah. I needed to start incorporating new technologies to take it further.

Kate Fielding: It's all tools.

Luke Cornish: It's all tools. Well, that's the thing, when Michelangelo or DaVinci started using the camera obscura, he was like, you can't do that. That's not how we make art. That no rules to making stencil art. And if there was, it wouldn't be me that wrote them.

Kate Fielding: That is your takeaway quote for the night, folks.

Luke Cornish: Thank you. Thank you.

Kate Fielding: And so as we saw while you were looking at the work earlier going, oh, that bit of green. So colour is obviously a really key part and a really deep layered part of your work. Tell us about that.

Luke Cornish: I think more OCD. It's always been a vehicle I could channel my OCD into.

Kate Fielding: Great.

Luke Cornish: Yeah. Color's, not necessarily a huge part of it. A lot of my work has been grey scale that's using blacks and whites and greys. I think essentially because that's all I had at the time, kind of necessity being the mother of invention. Even going back to the first stencil I made, I just had a can of paint and some cardboard and I made a painting. So I'm always using what's at hand to create the work. Even this week I pulled a bunch of coffee sacks out of the hopper at the studio, and I'm stretching it overboard. It looks really cool. It's like I could go and spend thousands on the finest linen to stretch over canvas, or I can just use what I've got here, which looks a hundred times better. So yeah, for me it's always been about using what I've got to get what I want.

Kate Fielding: Excellent. And going to that experimentation piece, we've talked about using what you've got, but you also, I think in just 2023 did a bunch of NFTs. I did, yeah. So tell us about that decision.

Luke Cornish: The NFTs, that's when everyone was, before NFTs died, everyone was doing NFTs, tragic.

Kate Fielding: The Tamagotchi of about three years ago.

Luke Cornish: I've got to be honest. I jumped on that train because I wanted to make money out of it. I wanted to just watching kids become millionaires for doing nothing. It's like I've been slogging for over 20 years, I want some of that fair. I do like the idea behind it, the way that you can have this non fungible piece of art, but I don't think we are there yet. I think at the moment it's just a Ponzi scheme. I think in 200 years it'll come back around, but I don't think there's any point getting excited about it. Now.

Kate Fielding: AI.

Luke Cornish: AI.

Kate Fielding: Small topic.

Luke Cornish: I've been using AI to do these astronauts. Oh, that's me. Should we talk about the Arch?

Kate Fielding: Yeah, let's talk about this.

Luke Cornish: Okay. So this is my Archibald portraits Father Bob. Sue Cato.

Kate Fielding: Superstar.

Luke Cornish: Superstar legend, Yvonne Weldon, who I painted in 2019 or 2022.

Kate Fielding: Beautiful.

Luke Cornish: I can't remember Yvonne again, who I painted with my friend Christophe Berg. He does the background and I do the stencils over the top. We've been collaborating for about 12 months. So I didn't decide to paint Yvonne a second time. She decided I was going to paint her a second time. I couldn't say no, but no, Yvonne's become a great friend. She's city of Sydney's first indigenous counsellor, and it's 150 year history.

Kate Fielding: Another superstar.

Luke Cornish: Yeah. Sorry, I'm having some issues. Bob. That's me with Bob. That's at the National Portrait Gallery just across the road.

Kate Fielding: Yep.

Luke Cornish: Yeah, that was a huge thing for me when they acquired that painting, that was the first painting that was accepted into the national collection. Yeah.

Kate Fielding: That's very special. And also what a beautiful image.

Luke Cornish: Yeah, very fond of that.

Kate Fielding: Yep. How did you come to be spending time with him?

Luke Cornish: Well, funny story, I got in touch with Bob through a contact of a contact painted his portrait when I was in Melbourne. And I think maybe 12 months later, I moved to Sydney and moved into this studio this guy was running. And we got talking and I told him about my portrait of Bob, and he's like, oh yeah, I heard about that. And then I showed him and he was like, oh, what's Bob like? I think I said something like he's, it's Bob Hawke. He's an Australian hero. Turns out this guy's Bob Hawk's stepson, who I've become very close with over the years. Sneaky, sneaky Louie. But yeah, my time in Sydney could have gone very differently if I didn't say that. But yeah, Bob's all right.
Thatt's Ben Quilty that won the People's Choice, [unclear] in 2017. And this piece won the Gallipoli Art Prize last year. But we'll get onto that later.

Kate Fielding: We'll get onto that. It's such a beautiful piece.

Luke Cornish: We were talking about AI.

Kate Fielding: We were talking about AI.

Luke Cornish: So I've been doing a series

Kate Fielding: Of, oh, actually before we do. Okay, folks, we were warned that AI might automatically generate captions on some of these. Have you seen any automatic, stick your hand up if you've seen Automatically generated. Yep. Okay, great. Cool. So, oh, what about those AI captions? What do you think about AI?

Luke Cornish: You just can't stop it. Yep. It's just everywhere. I'm in two minds about it. I think it's going to make people lazy. No one, well, that's what technology does, really stops you from thinking for yourself. But it's also going to provide opportunities for so many creatives. Not to make them lazy, but to evolve their practises, evolve their careers with tools that no one's ever seen and the immediacy of it.

But I've been using it with these astronauts. I've doing them street art. I started doing a couple of years ago because my work's always been a little bit dark, very war focused, and talking about the rides of authoritarianism. And I sort of got to a point where I just wanted to do something kind of nice. And I started doing street art. The stencils of the astronauts just to provide some positive imagery. We're just saturated with media and negativity. The news is just horrible. Have you seen Twitter lately? Gross.

Kate Fielding: Gross.

Luke Cornish: So yeah, for no other reason than to just do something positive. And unfortunately, I don't have any friends that are astronauts.

Kate Fielding: Are there any astronauts here tonight?.

Luke Cornish: Astronauts here?

Kate Fielding: There is one.

Luke Cornish: Can I paint your photo? Yeah, I don't have a spare. 200 grand to buy an astronaut. So I'm using AI to come up with these images. Whether that's cheating or not, I don't think so.

Kate Fielding: And you touched there on that war has been a really significant theme within your work. And obviously we did a check there on Syria earlier. You've made multiple trips to Syria, to Lebanon and Iran. What drew you to those places? And can you talk a bit about the kind of experience there?

Luke Cornish: Sure. The first exhibition I ever saw when I was in high school was at the Drill Hall Gallery, ANU, by an artist called George [unclear]. And he's a conflict artist who travelled to Rwanda and made art about the genocide. That was a pretty heavy art exhibition to be made, first art exhibition. But it changed me. It really made. When I was saying before, I wasn't exposed to art growing up in Spence, and then I was, it made me realise, oh, that's something you can do. You can just do that. So I think it percolated, it just, in the back of my mind. And I'd always wanted to do the conflict artist residency with the War Memorial, but they never asked. I just got sick of waiting. So I went to Lebanon and then to Syria, and I'd spent a lot of time in the Middle East just being around conflict.

In hindsight, I don't think I'd do it again. When you get to a conflict zone, you realise that everybody there is a bit crazy. Not the people in the war, but the people that are attracted to conflicts, they're all fucking crazy. They're there. They're not helping. They're just there to get something for themself. And I had a bit of self-reflection. It's like, is that what I'm doing? Am I doing this for my career? I think I just need to stay away from it. But it opened my eyes. It put me in some pretty hairy situations. And I'm not saying I regret doing it. It was a major part of my career, but it also taught me a lot about myself.

Kate Fielding: And kind of building off that you co-founded To Syria-

Luke Cornish: For Syria's Children.

Kate Fielding: For Syria's Children, sorry. And you curated an urban art auction. Tell us about that.

Luke Cornish: Well, this is around the time I started realising maybe I'm not doing this for the right reason. And I came back and put on an art auction in Melbourne to raise money. So I was working with the children's charity into [unclear], and we raised $40,000 for [unclear] orphanage. That's me in Syria, Dora the Explorer. I like the idea of taking Dora places she would otherwise never go to, but also where she was most desperately needed. That's me doing street arts.

Kate Fielding: Go back. What was the little birds?

Luke Cornish: It's a little rat.

Kate Fielding: Oh, a little rat. Of course. 

Luke Cornish: I got in trouble for that rat. This guy came up, he's like, why are painting a rat? It's disgusting. Never heard of Banksy. You never heard of Black Rat. But I get his point. He's like, we don't want to look at rats. It's some of the most stencil art in the middle.

So this guy on the left, on the right, [unclear] was the curator of antiquities in Palmera, which is a area of Syria. It was full of ruins now. But he was beheaded by ISIS in 2010 or 2011. Basically, they came in to the town and said, I think they emptied the museum. They took all the pieces to Damascus, and they said he wouldn't tell them where they were. So they beheaded him. And I was there, I think six months later. So I painted his portrait on the amphitheatre. So I got there I think the Russians had taken it back from isis. And there was a two month window before ISIS took it back. And that's when we were there. So I painted this portrait on that door, and when they came back, they blew up the whole amphitheatre. But that door survived. And the only artwork in the entire museum, [unclear], is the painting that I did of [unclear]. So I'd love to go back one day and see it, but last time I was there, these guys on the right, he's the director of the Museum of Damascus who was [unclear] son-in-law. So I painted that on paper as a gift. It was nice to, it was a nice time. I enjoyed that process.

Kate Fielding: That's an incredible series of events. A beautiful, beautiful story. Sorry and obviously horrific story and set of circumstances.

Luke Cornish: Well, I think that's another thing that drew me to the Middle East. Arabs just get such a bad rap in the media. We're just lied to about how these people are. And you go there and they're the most genuine, warm, hospitable people on the planet. It just makes you question, why are they trying to keep us apart? I don't get it. And that's kind of what drew me to the Middle East, just questioning everything.

Kate Fielding: How did you actually come to be in Syria? I imagine it would've been a fairly complex Yeah, logistical task.

Luke Cornish: So the first time I went with a group of boxes run by.

Kate Fielding: But hang on, I just nodded. That was a group of boxerrs. Group of boxes boxing.

Luke Cornish: Well, it was this guy from Sydney, Father Dave Smith was taking a group of boxers on a interfaith mission, Christians and Muslims, and they were boxing the Syrian Olympic team. And I wanted to go because I'd been to Beirut a couple of times and I wanted to go to Syria, but I could never get into a conflict zone. And I just put my hand up. I said, I can box and I could not box. I was more scared of boxing than I was of going to a war zone, getting in the ring with Olympic boxers. But I think I had an injury and I had to pull out. So I signed up. I think there was an SBS cameraman had to pull out. So I was like, I can use a camera. So I signed up.

Kate Fielding: So multi-talented.

Luke Cornish: Oh yeah, I'm probably better at boxing than I'm using a camera. So anything to get in. And yeah, it was very sort of state sanctioned trip. We were babysat the whole time and we weren't shown any destruction. It was very sugarcoated. But I made a few friends over there and I went back the next time by myself. And that was a different story. That was in the heart of the conflict zone, and that was life-changing. Do I have any photos of that? This is me at a function of the Syrian Arab Olympic Committee receiving a prize for something. You see the look on my face thinking, how the fuck did I get here? What am I doing here?

Kate Fielding: The prize for the man who lied about being able to box, I think is what's going on.

Luke Cornish: Going from making stencils on his back step to dodging bombs in Syria. These are the guys I raised the money for. So I put on an artist, what's the word I'm looking for? Exhibition raised money and went back. I don't know if you've ever tried to get 28 grand into a war zone, but.

Kate Fielding: I have not.

Luke Cornish: It's stressful. I had to go to Beirut and just go from ATM to ATM, pulling out 200 bucks at a time, walking around with thousands in cash in my pocket. It's probably the single most stupid thing I've ever done. But they were very grateful. And that was my way of overcoming that thought of maybe I'm being a selfish prick by taking away from this. I wanted to give something back before I said that's enough.

Kate Fielding: And I guess building on that conflict theme, as we mentioned earlier, you've just won the Gallipoli Art Prize. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. Tell us about choosing the subject for that and the experience of that prize.

Luke Cornish: So that's the piece I won the Gallipoli Prize with. It's loosely based on Michelangelo's La Pieta, which means translates to the pity. And it's about the pity. I've got it. The pity of war, which. My great grandfather was an Anzac, a Gallipoli. And just kind of seeing firsthand the intergenerational trauma that comes from that sacrifice. That's what this piece is about. It's about, for every soldier that's passed away in a war, there's a mother that's lost a son, a sister that's lost a brother, and just the unseen impact of war. That's why I made that.

Kate Fielding: It's an incredible image.

Luke Cornish: This is my great-grandfather, Alex Mackenzie. We still talking about that?

Kate Fielding: Yeah, let's talk about that. Tell us about this.

Luke Cornish: Oh, this is some of my other work. Just we were going to talk about detail.

Kate Fielding: We were going to talk about detail. Let's talk about detail.

Luke Cornish: So this is in these pieces, there's hundreds of stencils as opposed to a Banksy, like a street art stencil. It's just one layer. This is hundreds of different little bits in it. Hundreds of different colours as well. That was, yeah, it was about pushing the technique, seeing how far I could take it.

Kate Fielding: And I'm distracted by the excellent drinks in the bottom right hand corner. So it tell us about.

Luke Cornish: The bubble tea.

Kate Fielding: Yeah, the bubble tea. That that's my detailed focus coming into play there. So tell us about the image.

Luke Cornish: The image was taken in [unclear]. I'd sort of travelled a lot around Asia, just taking photos everywhere around the world actually. I'd just take my camera and just walk. It inspired a body of work around 2013, I think.

Kate Fielding: Yeah, I mean it's extraordinarily detailed. You talked about going into the flow space with this. When you look at something like this.

Luke Cornish: Well, this is a hand cut stencil.

Kate Fielding: Yeah.

Luke Cornish: I can do a much better job by hand than I can with a computer. I just don't have the time. Or maybe that's a poor excuse. I just don't want to. I like this one on the right is New York City and just getting that effect with spray paint. The piece on the riot piece, I dunno if you can see the graffiti in the background. There was patitions from my local pub that were throwing out, the toilet. They gutted their bathrooms and it was all just sitting out the back and it was like 30 years of graffiti history. They were just going to put in the bin. I was like, no, I need to make art with that. It was amazing. So getting back to what I was saying before, using what was on hand, that was around the time of the COVID protest in Melbourne. I was very inspired by that at the time. But yeah.

Kate Fielding: And so we promised you a special guest, and now is the time where we're going to have our special guest. So Ken, it is your time to come on stage. The book's author Ken McGregor is going to join us on stage, and I'm going to ask the question that I have been wanting to ask. It's a very personal interest. So you've got heaps of birds in your work, and I don't think you can live in Canberra and not obsessed by birds. I certainly am. What's with all the birds?

Luke Cornish: So these birds.

Kate Fielding: So beautiful.

Luke Cornish: I actually took currency from every country in the world and pulped it down to make the paper. And the idea behind the piece was each one of these paintings breaks the law in every country in the world. But people care more about the paper than they do the endangered bird that's been painted onto it. We care far more about money than we do about things that actually matter.

Kate Fielding: Okay. I am just going to ask a question.

Luke Cornish: Sure.

Kate Fielding: Are chickens really endangered?

Luke Cornish: The Gaelic rooster?

Kate Fielding: Sorry, it's not a chicken. It's a Gaelic rooster.

Luke Cornish: It's a Gaelic rooster. Well, it's actually the national bird of each country. So I did 262 paintings. One for each country. Yeah.

Kate Fielding: Excellent.

Luke Cornish: And some of them are endangered.

Kate Fielding: Thank you. I was like, I'm learning about lobsters getting out their shells. I'm learning about the pressures on chickens.

Luke Cornish: Yeah, it's more about biology than stencils.

Kate Fielding: Thank you so much for joining us on stage, Ken. I've got some questions for you. You've written books as we've heard on some of Australia's greatest painters, [unclear], John Olson, Adam Cullen, to name a few. What personally drew you to Luke as a subject worthy of an incredible book, as we can see here, and how did your perception of him shift during the writing process?

Ken McGregor: Well, the easy way to answer that is he's worth it. But I will elaborate. The technique that he has developed from an early age, I believe, is, no one else can do it in the world like he does it. And I've met a lot of stencil artists and gone to a lot of their studios all around the world. And his technique is simply extraordinary. And that's what drew me to Luke in the first place.

That combined with the fact that he's got an enormous social conscience. So what he's aiming to do is to, it's not about bringing a war into your lounge room, like two artists, which will remain anonymous, do all the time with blood and guts and body parts and everything like that. So self-centered that it bores me. But what Luke does is he brings this conscience through his art, into people's homes and keeps it relevant. And whether that's the [unclear] with the Chinese, or whether it's people in Africa or the homeless in Australia, that to me was a crucial part of watching Luke develop over the air. So if you put that social conscience together with the extraordinary technique he got, that's basically why I thought it was very, very important to document it.

Kate Fielding: Beautiful. So you've kind of touched there on ideas of faith and conflict and identity as part of themes within his work. What, I guess in your conversations working on this, what insights did you gain there from him about how those experiences have really shaped the work and pushed the work?

Ken McGregor: Well, it's interesting to hear Luke say that he felt a little bit self-conscious and, perhaps when he was in Syria, not being there for the right reasons. But I don't necessarily agree with that. I think he went there for the right reasons. He just saw a lot of other people there that were just sucking as much as they could out of the place. But Luke being Luke, he got so much out of that. He learned so much. He learned about the people there. He made friends there. And he doesn't just make friends with the rich or the elite. It's ground zero stuff. He makes friends with the ice cream seller. So all those.

Kate Fielding: I mean, that's a really good decision.

Luke Cornish: I make friends with ice cream cellars everywhere.

Ken McGregor: Maybe he took a little bit out of that. But the street vendors, and they're the people on the ground. They are the ones that suffer. Okay. So to bring their images back to exhibitions here and then from there into our homes, I think is really important because it's relevant. It keeps us up to date. And also his portraits of the children, which you saw on the street there. What he was doing is giving these people a little bit of hope, a little bit of joy in terrible circumstances where they have nothing. I mean, you saw some of the photographs there, the bombed out landscape. I mean, it's not just a bombed out landscape, people's homes. So these kids had homes. It's like what's happening in the Middle East now? The terrible tragedy that's happening there now. I mean, all those kids that Luke met and did a stencil of, I mean, you could see the joy on their faces. They're giving a peace sign. That to me is why I did this book on Luke, because I think that it is very, very relevant. And I think everybody should have the opportunity to actually see what the exceptional contribution that he's done, not just for society, but in his art as well.

Kate Fielding: And of course, I guess stencil art is associated with street art and counterculture, et cetera. How has that perception changed in the, I guess, the academic and institutional art world?

Ken McGregor: Well, if you go back through history, what we know about past civilizations, we know through their art. You go back to the Romans and the Greeks and you look at their ceramics. You look back through the historical documents and the paints that were done before the age of the camera. It's how we learn what's happened. And that's exactly what Luke does now, as I said, in Syria and Lebanon or he is travelled around the world, all the places he's done, he's documented what's there. And that's another reason why I've done quite a lot of books because I love documenting things, which are happening. But one question I get asked quite a lot is, why do I do a book on this person and why do a book on that person? I have to like the person, I have to like what he or she has to say, and I have to like what. It's not just liking the image. You've got to like the person because it's that old story. Everybody wants art hanging on the walls, but not necessarily an artist in their house. Some of them are mean, but Luke's exactly the opposite. What you see is what you get. The beauty of his documentation and the fact that he's putting money back into these places and giving people hope and giving the children something which they'll never forget. That's really important. And that's a measure of the man.

Kate Fielding: You're not too, you'll take it.

Luke Cornish: I'll take it. Thank you.

Kate Fielding: Is there anything else you wanted to.

Ken McGregor: This wasn't rehearsed either, by the way. I dunno what questions they're going to ask.

Kate Fielding: Was there anything else you wanted to show us? We're coming towards the end of our time.

Luke Cornish: On here.

Kate Fielding: Yeah.

Luke Cornish: I think it's just the birds.

Kate Fielding: Great. Ideal. Yeah. So as we're looking at this incredible headpiece on that bird, so we are going to have some time to gather upstairs. Congratulations. This book to both of you, it's obviously a really significant milestone.

Luke Cornish: Thank you.

Kate Fielding: If you haven't had a chance to look at it, it is extraordinarily beautiful. And I wanted to finish by asking, is there something that you'd want people to take away from tonight and from your journey that we've explored tonight.

Luke Cornish: I'd like them to take away a book, please. I think seeing that exhibition by George [unclear], the impact it had had on me, if I can pass that on to someone else, that would be incredible. And I think at this point in my career, that's all I could hope for. It's just to encourage the next generation, show them what's possible. You don't have to work in the stacks your whole life.

Kate Fielding: There's a world of ice cream ahead of you and other things. Well, let's leave it there. Thank you everyone for being here tonight. Thank you for everyone online, thank the two of you. What an extraordinary conversation to have been part of, and we'll hand back to our hosts. Thank you.

Daniel Gleeson: There's nothing wrong with working in the stacks. But look, thank you so much, Luke, Ken, and Kate for that fascinating discussion. Before we end tonight, I'd just like to remind you all that our bookshop is open upstairs and we've got many copies of 'The Stencil Art of Luke Cornish', which are available for purchase up there. And I'm sure if you asked nicely, Luke would be more than happy to sign copies of the book for you. Ladies and gentlemen, please join with me in a final round of applause for Luke Cornish, Ken McGregor and Kate Fielding.