Insight 28: The Concept Worked yet the Sculpture Failed

I could explain why almost every part of the sculpture was there. That did not make the sculpture work.

Clathria pulmonalis began as the third work in my Microplastics series, and I had given it a particular research job. The earlier works were testing different ways that waste, future ecology and recognisable forms might operate within the sculptures. For this one, I wanted to explore relationship rather than simply introduce another symbolic object.

I did not arrive at the proposition easily. An early version involved flowers, then a heart, and at one point I even wondered whether a bow might somehow pull the composition together. Looking back, that probably says more about where my thinking had stalled than about the strength of the idea. I was continuing to add familiar signs to something I was already unconvinced by instead of stopping to ask what I actually wanted the work to do.

Eventually I moved toward lungs because breathing gave me a more useful way to think about relation. Lungs depend upon passage, exchange and connection. I could build two related structures rather than one isolated symbolic form, and use 3D-printed filament almost as respiratory tissue, moving between something synthetic, biological and damaged. The pink forms above the glass vessels drew loosely from marine finger sponges, so they could sit somewhere between sea organism, bodily tissue and an unfamiliar future ecology.

Pic above: design concept moving from flowers to lungs.

Conceptually, this made sense to me, and materially quite a lot of it worked too. The transparent filament became fibrous, irregular and difficult to classify. The sponge surfaces shifted between marine organism and flesh. At the points where the filament seemed to enter or disappear into the pink forms, the materials began to feel interdependent rather than simply placed beside each other. I was getting some of the ambiguity and material tension I wanted.

Then I stepped back.

The sculpture was still two vertical stacks of glass spheres with two pink forms above them and a connecting structure between them. The four spheres were large, repeated and geometrically strong. The pink sponge forms were opaque and visually assertive. The transparent respiratory structure, which was supposed to connect the two sides and carry much of the idea of lungs, became comparatively weak once I moved away from the work.

In other words, the thing I thought was conceptually central was not visually central at all. The sculpture was organising itself around the glass towers and sponge forms, while I was still thinking about it as a respiratory system.

That was particularly frustrating because this was not an early mock-up quickly demonstrating a bad idea. I had probably put about fifty hours into it by then. Individual experiments had succeeded. The surfaces were interesting. Some of the material relationships were doing exactly what I wanted. Yet the complete object was not bringing those decisions together into a convincing whole.

I was prepared to call it a failed artwork.

Pic above: The failed sculpt

That did not mean the research had failed, or that everything I had made should be discarded. In fact, the work was producing plenty of useful information. What had failed was the translation from a defensible proposition into a sculpture.

I had assumed that if I understood what the different elements needed to do, the making could gradually resolve how they would do it. That is often how I work. I do not want every artwork completely designed before I begin because too much is discovered through materials, scale, joining, accident and simply having the thing physically in front of me.

But there is a difference between leaving room for discovery and committing too early to an architecture that has not really been tested.

The four glass spheres became exactly that problem. Once I had built the bilateral structure, so much subsequent work depended on it that challenging it became increasingly expensive, both physically and psychologically. The lungs had given me a conceptual direction, but I had not tested the whole sculptural structure hard enough before moving into prolonged fabrication.

Eventually I reached the point where continuing to adjust the trachea felt less like responding to the sculpture and more like defending my original idea. I removed it completely.

Without that joining structure insisting that the work was lungs, the remaining forms began to look different. The vertical structures could read more like tap roots or strange growth systems, and the whole object began to suggest an ecology rather than an anatomical model. Removing the trachea did not solve the sculpture, but it allowed me to see that the thing I had actually made had developed away from the proposition I had designed.

Pic above: After tracheal surgery removal

I invited Meg into the studio ... I needed fresh eyes.

I showed her the work and, as we played with different possibilities, I balanced the discarded trachea back onto it. Her response was immediate: she thought it needed to return because it made the two towers feel like parts of the same organism. Importantly, she preferred it offset rather than centred. Centred, it started heading back toward anatomy. Asymmetrical, it could behave more like uncontrolled growth.

That gave me a completely different way to reuse something I had already decided had failed.

I reworked the tracheal form rather than restoring it. I partially untwisted it, changed its position and let it move upward asymmetrically across the two towers. From there I introduced finer twigging and branching so the structure could continue the sense of growth rather than terminate as a respiratory connector. What had originally been built to represent a trachea became the connective architecture of an unfamiliar organism.

That distinction has stayed with me. After spending so long making something, I could only see the trachea through the history of why I had made it and why it had failed. Meg did not have that history. She could look at the object sitting in front of her and ask what the form could do now. The material did not have to retain the meaning I originally assigned to it simply because that was why it existed.

The recovery of Clathria did not prove that the original design had secretly been right. It proved almost the opposite. The finished sculpture emerged once I stopped requiring the physical object to keep demonstrating the proposition I had started with.

Pic above: A finished result - connection made.

My practical conclusion from all of this is slightly less philosophical.

Maybe I need to start making maquettes.

Not polished miniature sculptures, and certainly not models that remove the possibility of material discovery, but something physical enough to test the whole-object architecture before I commit forty or fifty hours to fabrication. Sketches can tell me a great deal, but they did not show me just how dominant four repeated glass spheres would become, or how weak a transparent connecting structure would appear against them at distance.

Practice-led research can help me become much clearer about what I want an artwork to do. It can give me better questions, sharper intentions and a way of recognising when the work is drifting away from them. What Clathria has made equally clear is that a good proposition still has to survive becoming a sculpture.

And perhaps one of the simplest ways I can test that earlier is to make the whole thing small before I make it big.