When US forces launched an allied invasion of Iraq in 2003, artist Susan Norrie protested against the war.
Over a decade later, the Sydney-based artist was embedded with hundreds of Australian and Iraqi forces at a military camp as conflict reignited.
Norrie is one of eight female war artists to have been officially commissioned by the Australian War Memorial.
"I think many artists are quite adamantly against war," she said.
"I think it's interesting that the Australian War Memorial has this aspect to the culture, that it's funding artists to go to war to give another perspective."
In November 2016, she boarded a Hercules military aircraft from Baghdad, equipped with a camera.
The destination was Camp Taji, Iraq's largest military training base, where Australian and New Zealand troops were preparing Iraqi forces to battle Islamic State fighters for control of the city of Mosul.
But amid the routine of daily drills and relentless gunfire, images which have become synonymous with war, Norrie said it was the role of the war artist to capture the human stories which go unnoticed.
"I always get attracted to the things that you're not supposed to film," she said.
Her three weeks in Iraq resulted in the documentary film Spheres of Influence, featuring uniformed soldiers smoking on hookah pipes in crowded streets, sitting in beauty salons and captured in quiet moments of prayer.
"I don't think that they're [artists] interested in necessarily getting the great shot."
"It's actually about immersing yourself, embedding yourself in a situation. It's a kind of curiosity."
Women enter the war
From the battlefields of World War I to peacekeeping missions in East Timor, Australian war artists have been present in most major conflicts of the 20th and 21st centuries.
But women's voices weren't officially represented until 1943.
"The frontline of war zones were considered a male only environment … I don't think it crossed anyone's mind to send a female artist," Australian War Memorial senior curator of art Dr Anthea Gunn said.
When Archibald Prize-winning artist Nora Heysen was appointed as Australia's first official war artist, her role was to paint studio portraits of women in the auxiliary service.
She later covered conflict in New Guinea and Borneo, but Dr Gunn said she encountered resistance when she wanted to showcase the role of women outside the conflict.
"During the Second World War there was much closer control about what it was they [artists] were depicting," she said.
"Nora also wanted to go forward into more of the front lines but that was considered too dangerous."
Dr Gunn said the role of the war artists remained a "very demanding undertaking" but artists now had freedom to create works independently.
"We are very conscious that we're sort of putting a burden on the artists," she said.
"There's this weight they carry in association with that commission as well as thinking about their own views of war in general."
Conflicting views on canvas
For Quandamooka artist Megan Cope, turning her experiences in the Middle East into art was a "terrifying" experience.
"I felt like there were lots of contradictions to what my practice is about in terms of activism, land rights and Indigenous rights," Cope said.
She is the first female First Nations artist to be commissioned by the Australian War Memorial.
Travelling with the Royal Australian Air Force, she spent ten days in 2017 at the Al Minhad and Al Dhafra Air base in the United Arab Emirates.
"I was very surprised and a bit anxious. I did ask has anyone ever died doing that?" Cope said
Her resulting series of works titled Fight or Flight is based on a 10-hour plane journey surveying the landscapes of Syria, Iraq, and Turkey.
Cope said she reflected on the stories of First Nations soldiers from her home on Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island) and the legacy of her great-great uncle Private Richard Martin, who fought and died in World War I.
"I think artists are in many ways the right kind of people to comment on this because we're not bound by political parties. We're kind of free agents and have the courage to tell the truth," she said.
"We're not afraid to kind of hold a mirror up to the rest of the world and remind people of humanity and the world we live in."
