Insight 24: Balancing Discovery and Illegibility

I have spent much of my practice deliberately making work that unfolds through looking. In my art dolls and mosaics, and later in my entomology domes and vintage butterfly frames, I created small worlds packed with detail. People regularly told me that the more they looked, the more they saw. At Gothic markets, some would look at superficially similar work elsewhere, then return to mine because they had discovered that it was not actually similar at all. There were layers in it, tiny shifts and details that rewarded coming back. I knew this, valued it and used it. Discovery was not an accidental effect, or something Fragile Futures taught me to consider. It was already one of the strengths I brought to the exhibition.

Pic above: Art doll 'Idunna' by Dina Goebel 2016

When I began developing Fragile Futures, I wanted to test that capacity at exhibition scale. The initial journey was always meant to bring people into a beautiful marine environment, let them become curious about the possibilities of 3D printing, then gradually reveal its consequences. Attention and discovery were designed into that proposition from the beginning.

What has changed is what I expect discovery to do.

In my earlier work, discovery largely extended delight. Someone liked the object, looked again, found another detail and liked it more. Now I am interested in what becomes legible through that continued attention, how quickly it becomes legible, and whether the discovery changes the viewer's understanding or merely gives them another thing to admire. This is not really a question of making every artwork slower. It is a question of what the time spent looking is for.

I had a useful opportunity to observe this at my Kyneton exhibition. The visitors I watched moved around the room methodically in the same order from the entrance. Nobody skipped ahead to a more immediately commanding work, and every artwork received close, due attention. Then individual preference began to show. One person would become particularly absorbed by a work that another had considered more briefly, and the point of extended looking varied across the exhibition. The display was successfully supporting attention, but it was not dictating a single tempo. The work mattered, the sequence mattered, and so did the person who had walked through the door.

Pic above: Fragile Futures viewer route, The Old Auction House, Kyneton. Oct 2026.

Looking is observable. Understanding is not.

That distinction is where the problem becomes more difficult. I first encountered it accidentally through Taxonomies of Absence. The works place 3D-printing waste around a dark central field containing faint taxonomic information, as though species knowledge is disappearing into a black hole. People responded to the black hole visually, but many did not decipher the information embedded within it. The work required slow interpretation, but only when somebody could be bothered to undertake it. If the viewer moved on before the proposition became available, I had not necessarily created productive delay. I may simply have made the work illegible.

Pic above: Taxonomies of Absence - Soldier Crabs

I have begun testing this boundary more consciously in Clathria pulmonalis Sp.01, one of the Microplastics works. Glass vessels, 3D-printing waste and sculpted marine growths form a strange emerging ecology, while a familiar bottle neck is being absorbed into the upper growth. I placed it subtly because I wanted its discovery to alter the reading rather than announce the work immediately. Across two events I had at least six detailed opportunities to observe or discuss the piece. Nobody independently noticed the bottle neck. A wall label mentioning it was available, although both situations constrained how easily the work could be read, so this is not enough evidence to declare the cue universally illegible.

What happened when I pointed it out was more revealing anyway. A couple of people clearly understood the change and connected the bottle to the human-made pollution within the work. A couple did not. The object had become visible, but its consequence had not necessarily become legible. Discovery had occurred without producing the shift in understanding I had imagined.

This presents a challenge because I do not want to make art cryptic simply to make it seem deeper. I cannot do cryptic crosswords, I cannot do Scrabble, and I dislike art that seems to treat obscurity as a test the viewer must pass. At the same time, I do not want to explain everything so completely that the work closes before the viewer has brought anything of themselves to it. I have been told in academic critiques that some of my work is too resolved, and I have wondered whether my understanding of layered legibility is part of that. Yet material finish, compositional resolution and conceptual closure are not interchangeable. Hiding an important cue will not automatically keep a question open. It may just hide the question.

Pic above: Clathria pulmonalis Sp.01 closeup

Attention can make discovery possible. Discovery can make recognition possible. Neither guarantees the next.

This is the new part of the inquiry for me. I already know how to make objects that reward looking, and I now know that an exhibition can encourage people to give very different artworks sustained attention. What I do not yet know is how to judge the point at which delayed legibility becomes productive, or the point at which it asks too much and the meaning disappears. I am not looking for a formula, and I certainly do not want to turn the work into either a puzzle or a lesson. For now, learning to recognise that boundary, through making and then watching what viewers can actually find, is the work.

Related Insight 22: Permission to Use Tension, on learning to move beyond simply beautiful work without abandoning beauty as a way into the encounter.