Insight 22: Permission to use Tension

On 2 October 2025, I sat at Meg Viney's dining table with a page of notes about a possible exhibition built from 3D-printing waste. I had only recently met Meg and had asked if I could talk through some ideas with her.

At that point, I was coming off the high of a successful series of jellyfish artwork, and the exhibition formed in my head was still quite literal: an immersive marine environment with coral-like forms, jellyfish hanging from the ceiling and perhaps a giant turtle made from waste.

The concept behind it was already much more developed than the imagery might suggest. My notes included new technologies being inevitable, plastics as a consumer reality, conservation versus consumerism, pollution, habitat destruction, species loss and marine life at risk from plastic .. along list of ideas.

I did not want to fight 3D printing or pretend it would disappear; I wanted to use its own waste to re-educate, inform and share ideas. The Anthropocene paradox was already there, as was the idea that the exhibition would operate as an installation and unravel a story rather than present a collection of unrelated objects.

As I explained the idea, Meg began talking about thesis and antithesis, and about the need for something that would jolt people. Her example was unapologetically graphic: a beautiful jellyfish with plastic tentacles, entangling a dead seagull on the floor. In the notes I scribbled while we spoke, I wrote: scale of the problem, enormity of the problem, death from plastic, very beautiful but dying, beauty and harm coexisting, and a focal confrontational point. I underlined "open eyes to beauty at risk" and, separately, the single word "tension".

Pic above: Notes before and during the conversation

As she talked, I sketched the jellyfish and the dead seagull, but I never considered making it. That kind of didactic storytelling was not my language, and I did not want to replace a beautiful marine display with an artwork that delivered its meaning through a literal victim. What interested me was discovery: allowing a viewer to encounter the contradiction rather than being shown the tale and told how to read it.

Pic above: Diary diagram from that very conversation.

The exhibition did not need a new subject. I needed permission to use tension.

What I took from Meg was therefore the purpose of her suggestion, not the image itself. I already wanted viewers to enter a beautiful environment, learn something about 3D printing and then encounter its consequences. The journey did not substantially change after our conversation. What changed was my sense of how much tension I could allow into it. Somehow Meg gave me permission to dial it up, and I then had to determine where and how that could happen without losing the beauty or collapsing into confrontation for its own sake.

Understanding the instruction was not the same as knowing how to make it.

That distinction matters because, in my fine-art practice, I had generally played it safe. I knew how to make resolved, beautiful objects, and I had a great deal of practice doing it. I could explore discomfort within the Gothic aesthetic, but moving away from that familiar language left me less certain. I wanted the work to move beyond being simply beautiful and become meaningful, yet I did not want beauty to disappear. The difficulty was finding the point where attraction, tension, discomfort and questioning could coexist.

Some works, such as Self-Made Relics, carried tension intuitively because the theme of women in trapped situations had appeared throughout my practice over the years. I made them because they were forms I wanted to make, not because I yet possessed a conscious method for constructing tension. The larger challenge was to understand what I was already doing instinctively, where it was absent, and how it might become a skill I could deliberately draw upon without turning the artwork into a formula.

Pic above: Self-made Relic Despair

That became part of the purpose of my experimental work and, eventually, of the research that grew around it. The conversation at Meg's table did not hand me an answer or instantly transform the exhibition. It named a capability I did not yet have, but wanted badly enough to keep investigating: how to retain the strength of beauty while allowing the work to hold something more difficult using tension.

Recently, I made a new group of Weedy Sea Dragons for the Irony Specimens series. They sit beneath glass domes and are unashamedly beautiful; people respond to them immediately. I kept brushing them aside as simple because they were not carrying the disruptive message I was now seeking in my experimental work. A friend stopped me and pointed out that the technique, capability and eye required to create that beauty were highly worthy, and that I should not dismiss them simply because they were doing a different job.

Pic above: Beautiful Weedy seadragons

She was right. Beauty was never the weakness in my practice, and learning to create tension does not require me to devalue it. What changed through that early conversation was not the abandonment of beauty but the beginning of another, much less comfortable skill: moving from tension as an intuitive possibility to something I could understand, test and use consciously in the work.

Related Insight 18: The Exhibition Ideas I Had to Throw Away. How rejecting plausible eco-art devices clarified the encounter I did and did not want to create.’