Insight 19: It Took Forever to Describe My Work
Dina GoebelI have rewritten my artist statement so many times that I now have a small archaeological record of myself. One version calls me a wildlife fantasy artist. Another says I am a mixed-media sculptural artist exploring the fragile balance between consumerism and conservation. Another announces my mission to be a catalyst for change. Then come the versions about material tension, quiet activism, aesthetic attraction, positional recognition and changing how the problem feels.
It can look like indecision when the documents are lined up together. Yet each version described something that was genuinely happening at the time - the difficulty was that the practice kept moving faster than the language I had available for it.
If I go back through the photographs, I can see why naming myself through a subject or a style never held for very long. There are beaded vessels, mosaics, painted birds, burned forests, altered furniture, glass constructions, mythic figures, wildlife hybrids and Gothic assemblages. The forms change wildly throughout the decades, but the core, the essence .. all remained the same. Mixing materials, always nature inspired, appreciating beauty, the consumer contradiction and spending time on narratives, all kept returning.
Pic above: 'Sharing my Backyard' series, Cocoon - beaded vessel, 2006.
The tension between consumerism and conservation did not suddenly arrive with Fragile Futures. It has been in my dialogue as an artist for forty years. I have spent much of my life on beautiful acreage properties and in forests, caring deeply about the natural world while remaining unavoidably involved in the very systems of consumption that place pressure on it. That hypocrisy has bothered me for as long as I can remember.
What changed was not the concern. What changed was my decision to make it the organising purpose of the practice.
That decision became clear while I was making the jellyfish that would lead into Fragile Futures. At almost exactly the same time, life changes gave me the freedom to stop thinking commercially. I no longer needed the work to become a dependable line of income, and I had encountered 3D-printing waste as a subject that genuinely motivated me. Those two opportunities collided: I had something I urgently wanted to investigate and, for the first time, room to let the investigation lead.
Pic above: Irony Specimen - Moon Jellyfish, resin and pigment. 2025
I tend to think that when you open an opportunity to the gods, possibilities begin to fall into the funnel. This was partly luck, but it was not passive luck. I had opened the door. I was ready to move, I have always remained open to evolving, provided the subject mattered enough to me, and this one did.
Several other decisions arrived with it. I chose to pivot away from Gothic homewares as the centre of the business. I began repositioning myself away from self-managed expos, which had become physically taxing with heavy loads, and try my hand towards gallery representation. I realised the 3D-printing waste inquiry might be substantial enough to sustain a university Masters in Fine Art and, I was also mentally restless without the intellectual pressure of my former corporate life. It was not one neat revelation … it was four or five parts of my life suddenly pointing in the same direction.
That was why the old language stopped working. ‘Wildlife fantasy artist’ was an accurate description of a body of work, but it could not contain where I was going. It described the visible creatures. It did not describe the operating logic underneath them, nor the practice I was beginning to build around material systems, environmental consequence and the viewer’s encounter.
Pic above: Idunna Deerwoman, paper clay and acrylic, 2020.
Even ‘mixed-media sculptural artist’ was only the beginning. It gave me a more durable description because it named how I work rather than tying me to one family of subjects. But the moment I decided to become gallery-facing, the words had to do more than name a medium. They had to make the continuity of the practice legible while also showing that a deliberate change had occurred.
I was not simply replacing skulls with jellyfish, or fantasy with environmental work. I was changing what I expected the practice to do.
Pic above: 'Ancients Lost' series, 2025.
Some of my earlier statements said this very directly when I wrote about revealing the irony of how we preach conservation yet consume towards extinction. I said my mission was to be a catalyst for change and that I wanted to encourage behaviour change. Those sentences still sound like me, in fact, the desire behind them reaches well beyond the studio. My working career has been as a catalyst for change in corporate environments, in community work and now within the arts. I genuinely believe that the skills I have should be used, as well as I can use them, to contribute to making the world better.
My visual art is part of that activism. My business nous is part of it too; I do not need to pretend that ambition disappeared simply because my writing later became more careful.
The carefulness came from a different realisation.
There is a distinction between believing that art can contribute to behaviour change, designing an artwork in the hope that it will shift something, and claiming that a particular viewer was changed by it. The first is my conviction - the second is my intention - the third requires evidence.
For a while I had those three things crowded into the same sentences. As Fragile Futures became more explicitly practice-led research, I had to separate them. I could still say why I was making the work. I could describe the conditions I was constructing through beauty, familiarity, unease and recognition. What I could not responsibly do was announce the viewer’s outcome before the encounter had even taken place.
Pic above: an evolving journey, 'Windy Day', glass mosaic 2002.
My language became more cautious at exactly the point my purpose became more certain.
That change is visible across the documents. ‘A catalyst for change’ gradually sits beside ‘beauty is the first invitation, not the final statement.’ The wish to encourage change becomes an interest in how attraction can give way to unease. Eventually I arrive at: the work does not instruct; it creates conditions for recognition (which sounds like an instruction).
More recently, I have been able to state the practice position even more simply: I change how the problem feels.
None of those later sentences cancel the earlier ones, they place different levels of responsibility in the right place. My personal mission can remain unapologetically large, and the artwork can be precise about the experience it is designed to offer, then the research can remain honest about what was actually observed.
Learning to describe the work also meant learning that becoming gallery-facing was not a matter of dressing it in grander language. If anything, I had to remove the language that promised too much. I needed to stop describing only the object in front of me and make the larger inquiry visible: why these materials, why this beauty, why this tension and why the sequence of encounters mattered.
That took repeated attempts because I was not standing outside a finished practice, calmly naming it. I was inside the change while I was making the work, imagining an exhibition, preparing applications, testing research questions and trying to understand which parts of a forty-year history belonged to this next chapter. Every document became a temporary answer to a moving question.
A year later, I do not think I have found one perfect paragraph that will describe everything I make forever. I am not sure I would trust such a paragraph. What I have found is the thread beneath the changing objects:
A mixed-media sculptural practice concerned with the contradiction between consumerism and conservation, using beauty and material enquiry to bring a viewer close enough for consequence to be felt.
However, this short version may still be the truest:
Art is my activism.
Related Insight 06: Why I Needed a Framework for My Art Practice - a companion reflection on why recurring studio questions eventually required a more precise language of their own.
