Australian artist Luke Cornish's plan was to travel to Syria to compete in boxing exhibition bouts with the Syrian Olympic team. Instead, he ended up running art workshops with local children.
"I broke my rib before we were supposed to leave [Australia], so I stepped in to do some filming for a camera crew that was going," Cornish says.
"I just fell in love with the place."
For the last year, the stencil artist has travelled through Damascus, Palmyra, Aleppo, Homs and Maaloula working with Syrian children.
Cornish's new exhibition at Melbourne's Metro Gallery, Zero to the Left, displays both his and the children's work from his time spent in Syria.
He says stencil art has "evolved from the street art scene back in the 1970s", but remains an accessible artistic method.
"It's a method of getting a message out on the street, quickly, multiple times," he says.
His stencil methods are significantly more sophisticated than early stencil work, which relied on one or two layers.
Some works, he says, involve "up to 1,000 different layers".
Also at the gallery are photographs Cornish took in Syria, printed using a technique called sublimation on aluminium, which is the process of pressing a transfer onto aluminium using heated ink.
Entering a warzone
Cornish describes a bleak situation in Syria, but says people are still trying to get by in difficult circumstances.
"There's not much left, it's all rubble, but there's still people living there amongst it," he says.
Though he wasn't on the frontline, Cornish admits it was dangerous work, with aerial bombardments hitting some of the cities he worked in.
He jokes that his original plan was even more frightening.
"I was actually more scared of boxing in Syria than going to Syria," he says.
Working with Syrian children
Cornish says his art workshops, using supplies bought through fundraising, were warmly received by kids off the street and within schools.
"They are so appreciative that someone had come from the outside to spend time with them, just to let them know that they are not forgotten," he says.
"Syria relied heavily on tourism before this conflict, so seeing a random Westerner come through gives them a glimmer of hope that things are returning back to normal."
But for Cornish, the project was not so much about teaching art as distracting the children and giving them something fun to do.
Children also helped him spray his own stencil art onto the cities' remaining walls and buildings.
"I painted a stencil of Dora the Explorer — I love the irony of that," he says.
"I love the idea of taking this cartoon character that under no circumstances would go to the country where the children need her the most."
Cornish is planning another trip to Syria later this year, again to work with local children. His aim is to put a human face on the Syrian conflict.
"You decide what kind of art you want to make, but you need to decide which kind of artist you want to be," he says.
"I'm very privileged to be in a position where I can do whatever I want, so I want to use that privilege to create some kind of positivity in the world."
