Insight 23: My Method Is, Like My Materials, Mixed

I have been an artist for over forty years, and within that, I have followed a mixed and winding path rather than one straight line. For example, nearly five years ago, I became a full-time artist yet again due to changing life conditions, and at the same time I was asked to run a Gothic stall, which led me to build a Gothic homewares business for the following few years.

Pic above: Oddities Expo with my gothic range, Melbourne Showgrounds Dec 2025.

Then, about a year and a half ago, a friend invited me to contribute to her pastel seascape exhibition, and working out what a Gothic sculptor could possibly make to sit beside pastel seascapes is how the jellyfish series began. While making them I noticed the volume of 3D-printing waste accumulating I was generating as a result. That waste became the purpose behind Fragile Futures.

Pic above: The lovely Vitamin Sea exhibition, Stockyard Gallery Foster, Dec 2025.

None of that happened because I decided an artist ought to have a purpose, or a method, or a single material. It happened because each thing that showed up, luck, a friend's invitation, a pile of waste I couldn't stop looking at, landed.

My method is, like my materials, are mixed.

That is not the same as having no direction. Every body of work I make has always had a driving motivation sitting underneath it, a spine that holds it together for however long that body of work takes, six months or several years.

What changes is the kind of motivation.

Material curiosity is where my current exhibition of Fragile Futures began: I wanted to understand what I could do with 3D-printing waste. However underneath - the body of work is anchored deeply in my observations of the conflict between conservation, consumption and the consequences of 3D printing itself.

At the other end of the scale, the Gothic homewares business were anchored in something simpler: I needed an income, I had a mortgage to pay, and I let that be the honest reason rather than dressing it up as something more elevated. Letting the real motivation surface, instead of forcing a more flattering one, is as much a part of the method as anything else.

The capacity to follow an idea wherever it takes me.

Some artists spend a decade with one material, glass, and their purpose is to push it as far as their skill and understanding can take it. I respect that completely, but it is not my path. What I have instead is the capacity to follow an idea wherever it takes me, across materials, across techniques, across whatever happens to be sitting unused on a studio shelf, and that capacity is the benefit I find in working with mixed-media, not a lack of focus.

Self-Made Relics is one example of how differently that can happen.

I had printed mannequin samples nearly two years before I made anything with them, and motivation alone never got them off the shelf. They stayed parked until Fragile Futures gave them a context. I picked up one of the figures, some of the waste I had been collecting, and a vessel that was also sitting unused, and started experimenting. Gothic and taxidermy work had already made specimen vessels familiar to me. Years of making ball-jointed dolls had taught me how emotionally a small figure could be posed. None of that arrived as one clear vision. It accumulated via parked objects, old skills, a new purpose, and I played with the materials until the combination became visible.

After the Species totems came together almost the opposite way.

I had an early, fairly resolved vision, totemic forms evoking giant kelp forests, with 3D-printing waste embedded in translucent resin ribbons. I developed it digitally before ever building a prototype, and it only became possible because specific resources happened to be available at the right time, resin-panel techniques from years earlier, cypress blocks through my son's timber mill, steel fabrication my husband could help with. The concept was clear from the start. The materials had presented themselves serendipitously.

Pressed by Desire: Soldier Crabs evolved differently again.

The motivation there was simple, I just wanted to make 3D-printed soldier crabs. Once I had a small cluster, they reminded me of their beachside movement in mass, which then suggested mass production, and gave them a clearer role inside Fragile Futures. After the first iteration, the black display frames weren't working at an exhibition level, they flattened the piece but I didn't yet have a fix. Then I was gifted a Perspex box, and it was only because I already knew the black frames were wrong that I thought to try the crabs inside it. What that produced, shadows thrown across the wall as light passed through, wasn't something I designed. It came from a decision I'd already been circling, meeting a material I hadn't gone looking for.

I am comfortable with uncertainty, serendipity and purpose all colliding in any order.

Looking across these, there isn't a formula hiding underneath the variety, planned art on one side and discovered art on the other. There's purpose meeting whatever chance puts in front of it, a different way each time, and a driving motivation underneath each body of work that I let surface honestly rather than choosing in advance.

Fragile Futures is what keeps that breadth from becoming scattershot. It gives me a reason to decide which experiments belong and which technically successful objects aren't working or contributing. Without that, following every idea wherever it leads would just be novelty. With it, the variety stays mine, unique to me - rather than becoming a formula I could just as easily hand to someone else.

I want to be known as an artist whose next work can't quite be predicted, carrying one real concern through pieces that behave nothing alike. That's only possible because nothing about how I get there is fixed. My method is, like my materials, mixed.

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Related Insight 19: It Took Me a Year to Learn How to Describe My Own Work. How the language of the practice changed as its purpose and professional direction became clearer.