Insight 20: The benefits of preparing for an MFA

I had not begun a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) when preparing for one started changing my practice; I was still exploring the possibility of an exhibition about 3D-printing waste, and the idea of tension that my mentor, Meg Viney, had introduced much earlier was beginning to take hold.

I could feel the intensity with which I was thinking about the exhibition and the possibility of realising my activism through art, and while it was artistically exciting, I could also see that the thinking behind it could become a rich academic resource in the future, provided I began capturing it immediately.

The benefits of keeping evidence

I knew from experience that if I did not treat each day almost like a diary entry, I would lose the valuable part: not simply what I made, but what I noticed, questioned, abandoned and changed along the way. Once a thought has evolved, it is almost impossible to remember accurately what you thought before you knew where it would lead! The possibility of an MFA gave me a reason to document the exhibition's evolution, my thinking about the artwork designs and my material exploration as they developed, keeping earlier drafts and recording decisions while they were still alive rather than trying to reconstruct them afterwards.

Pic above: documenting work in progress of Brittle Stars.

Reflection itself was not new to me, and about ninety per cent of it has probably happened in the shower at the end of the day, when I naturally run back through what I did and what I observed, but writing it down and retaining the trail changed what that reflection could become. A private thought that might once have disappeared by morning became something I could revisit, compare and question, and gradually I was creating a history of my own thinking rather than trying to reconstruct everything from the finished result.

The possibility of doing an MFA also gave me the mental stimulation I had been looking for because coaching, teaching and creating written or diagrammatic material had been a large part of my earlier businesses and career, including ArTTable, and I have always enjoyed sharing vision and inspiration in those forms.

Returning fully to art gave me the making, but my mind still felt too idle, to the point where I was thinking about TV soaps! Goal-oriented research gave my systems-thinking mind somewhere to go, and because I tend to become obsessively channelled once a problem catches me, I could pursue it while leaving no stone unturned.

One question about the developing Fragile Futures exhibition concept immediately produced another: how should I construct the exhibition, what kind of narrative did it need, what was each part of that narrative supposed to do, how might a viewer move through it, and where should the experience leave them? Each answer opened several more directions, and before long I had an immense web of research in front of me to explore.

Pic above: Testing, observing and noting exhibition dynamics. Meeniyan Gallery April 2026.

Research gave my practice a clearer purpose and language

A web can be finite if you decide where its boundaries sit, which meant I could explore widely and then make decisions about which questions genuinely belonged to the practice and which did not. That process gave Fragile Futures a coherent direction, but it also gave me a longer and clearer strategy for my practice, and because I become unmotivated when I am wafting, once I had unravelled enough of the web to set an aspiration and a goal, my focus became stronger. The direction felt substantial enough to sustain me for years rather than simply carry one exhibition.

I had never written a research paper, so I also had to learn how to direct my thinking towards research and understand the language around it. In my previous work I had undertaken methodology reviews, but literature reviews were different because they asked me to engage with theoretical positions, not only processes. That opened an area I had wanted access to since moving further into the arts community: it gave me a reason to examine other artists' work closely, find language for what I was observing and develop interpretations that were independently mine.

I am still far from educated in the breadth of art theory, but I am more informed. When I speak with artists who have longer histories in the arts community, or with curators, gallery owners and academics, I now have something grounded to contribute. More importantly, it is not vocabulary borrowed simply to sound as though I belong: it has emerged through a problem I have been investigating and through ideas I have had to test against my own work.

The application process eventually gave me more than a creative direction because it forced greater precision: a broad concern with consumerism, conservation and 3D-printing waste was already my creative direction, but it was not yet a research question. I needed to identify the specific problem inside it, clarify what the artworks might be trying to do and define what the research could reasonably claim, which meant accepting boundaries too; I could investigate the conditions an artwork creates, but I could not claim that art guarantees outcomes or behaviours. Those limits did not diminish the project, but made the inquiry more usable.

Keeping all of those notes, questions, drafts and revisions has produced another benefit I did not anticipate because I can now see patterns in my development that were invisible while I was living through them. The Insights series exists because I have that record in hand, so rather than inventing a tidy journey retrospectively, I can return to the points where I was uncertain, excited, frustrated or simply wrong and see what changed next.

Yet there was a cost to all this structure

At the same time, I had made a conscious decision to fast-track the Fragile Futures exhibition through 2026 so I could gain first-hand gallery experience quickly. I was entering the curatorial gallery environment stone cold. I had exhibited through expos, but galleries brought different questions of placement, sequence, context and representation that I could not fully understand from the outside. I needed the work to exist and to enter those rooms, so the exhibition and the MFA preparation accelerated together.

I used the same systematic thinking to design and produce the artworks quickly, and that was only just acceptable to me, although my technical ability carried the accelerated making far enough that the cost of that compression was not always obvious. Some works had been resolved conceptually before my hands had enough room to discover what their form could become, and I can see that in them now; even so, the direction was distinctive and deeply considered, and I have no need to change the exhibition zones or abandon the works still proposed for Fragile Futures over the next twelve months.

Since submitting the MFA applications in early August, I have deliberately stopped revisiting the papers and stepped back from active research, allowing myself to experiment in the studio without driving immediately towards a preconceived object. The purpose still comes first and is now very clear, which is perhaps the most lasting change the preparation has made, but it no longer has to dictate the form before making begins; I can let my hands, materials and technical knowledge unravel the work that might achieve the destination I have already defined, and that shift is becoming visible in Microplastics.

Pic above: the much slower developing Microplastic series.

I still do not know whether I will begin the MFA in the new year, yet strangely, that outcome has become almost inconsequential beside the benefits and resources the preparation has already generated. I have a twelve-month documented history of the work, a research question, a stronger vocabulary, a defined practice and a direction I can live from for years, so preparing for an MFA changed how I think, record, research and make before I ever started one.

Related Insight 21: An Ever-Moving Research Question, how the question became useful by continuing to change with the practice.