Insight 01: The Artwork That Changed How I Think About Beauty

I made an artwork I didn't particularly like.

That sounds like a fairly poor outcome after weeks of making, but Gathered with Care: Brittle Stars probably taught me more because of that discomfort than it would have if I had stood back at the end and thought, yes, that's beautiful.

The original intention was straightforward enough. Fragile Futures needed an opening zone, and I wanted that first encounter to feel calm rather than confrontational. There would be plenty of ecological difficulty later in the exhibition. At the beginning, I wanted people to find something familiar enough, attractive enough, that they might stay. 

So beauty had a job.

Panel I was my first deliberate attempt to work out what that might look like. I chose the pale, restrained palette of coastal interiors, the sort of washed-out softness that would not look remotely out of place above a sideboard in a beach house, and paired it with something rather less familiar: the monkey brittle star, a tiny four-millimetre creature from the deep trenches of Bass Strait.

Almost nobody looking at the panel would know what it was.

That suited me. The work could borrow the visual language of those familiar stuck-on-starfish plaques while quietly replacing the expected creature with something local and largely unseen. Each brittle star was sculpted in air-dry stone clay, painted individually and arranged against birch in a disciplined specimen-like grid, with enough broken arms, damaged forms and odd orientations to stop the whole thing becoming completely obedient.

I wanted the first read to be calm, but not the last one.

The problem was that the balance turned out to be annoyingly fine. Too regular and it tipped straight into decoration. Push the damaged specimens too hard and the disturbance announced itself before the beauty had done its job.

Then colour started causing trouble.

The resolved mineral palette introduced an institutional coolness that had not been deliberately prioritised.

I made art I did not like.

My own aesthetic world is much warmer and earthier. My home is full of timber, organic texture, old things, strange things, and rather more gothic influence than pale coastal restraint. The finished panel sat almost completely outside that world.

Years earlier, when I was making gothic homewares, somebody had once stood in front of one of my pieces and asked, "Who would have something like that in their home?"

My answer was immediate.

"I would. People like me. People who live in a different tonal world."

I have remembered that conversation for years because it was such a blunt little lesson in the absurdity of treating taste as universal. Something can be well made, coherent and completely intentional and still be rejected because it simply does not belong to the aesthetic world of the person looking at it.

Panel I turned that lesson back on me.

I had made something in service of an artistic purpose that did not happen to match my own taste, and for a while I treated that discomfort as though it meant the work itself had gone wrong.

I think the more useful problem was that I had been trying to make too many things equally important at once.

The panel was carrying domestic familiarity, museum authority, recognisability, visual appeal and the wider purpose of Zone 1, and I had never really decided which of those should win if they started pulling in different directions. They did ... institutional coolness won.

That became one of the first things the work made obvious to me: saying everything is important is not the same as making a decision. If several intentions are sitting side by side with equal status, something will eventually dominate anyway, usually the thing with the strongest visual pull, and it may do that very quietly while you're busy making.

What changed was that I stopped treating my dislike as the final judgement and started asking what it was actually telling me.

Gathered with Care: Brittle Stars panel I

The next problem arrived once the panel was finished and standing in the studio. The monkey brittle star itself was unfamiliar, which meant the work was leaning very heavily on aesthetic attraction to let people in. A recognisable creature might have carried some of that work through familiarity alone, this one couldn't.

So if beauty was doing that much of the work, whose beauty was I actually talking about? Certainly not everyone's.

That old gothic-homewares conversation came back again. If three people stood in front of three different versions of the brittle stars, there was every chance they would each prefer a different one, not because one panel was objectively better, but because each person would bring a different aesthetic history into the room with them.

Controlled deviations in spacing, orientation and specimen condition interrupt the decorative grid without displacing its initial calm.

That old gothic-homewares conversation came back again. If three people stood in front of three different versions of the brittle stars, there was every chance they would each prefer a different one, not because one panel was objectively better, but because each person would bring a different aesthetic history into the room with them.

One version of beauty was never going to be enough. That much was clear before I knew what came next.

I didn't go back and remake Panel I into something closer to my own taste. I moved forward instead, toward another panel that could hold a different version of beauty entirely, one built for someone standing in a different tonal world altogether.

I think that was the real shift for me.

Before Panel I, I was still treating beauty largely as a quality an artwork could possess. Afterwards, it became much harder to think about it that simply. Beauty had become contextual, personal and useful. It could attract, reassure, create familiarity or establish trust, but it could also pull a work somewhere I had not intended if I was not clear about what I was asking it to do.

And my own taste was only one part of that equation. I still prefer the warmer, stranger, more organic end of the spectrum. That hasn't changed.

What changed was my willingness to make outside it.

Panel I did not teach me what beauty is. What it taught me was that the beauty an artwork needs may not be the beauty I would choose for myself. Sometimes the artwork I am least comfortable with is the one that changes how I think about beauty next.

Read Insight 03: Why Begin with Beauty in Eco-Art?