The Artwork That Changed How I Think About Beauty

Gathered with Care: Brittle Stars panel I

The intention was simple: build a body of work for Zone 1 of the Fragile Futures exhibition, and begin a quiet narrative about the ecological cost of unseen 3D-print waste.

What was not anticipated was that the greatest outcome of that intention would not be the finished artwork at all, but the challenges, questions and insights the making itself generated along the way, including a harder question than expected: what beauty means to the person actually making it.

Zone 1 has one job within the exhibition. It is the first thing a viewer meets, and its role is not confrontation but to hold calm, using familiar beauty at the entry point so a viewer feels safe enough to keep looking before any eco-art interpretation is asked of them. Beauty here is a structural device, not decoration. This first artwork, titled Gathered with Care: Brittle Stars, was the first place this idea was tested.

The concept for Panel I was specific. It would sit within the limewash pastel aesthetic already familiar in coastal decorating and interiors, pale, soft, immediately at home on a wall, reminiscent of stuck-on-starfish plaques. One species could carry that familiarity while quietly undermining it: the monkey brittle star, a four-millimetre creature from the deepest trenches of Bass Strait that almost no one would recognise, arranged in a grid that would read as both museum-like specimen display and decorative arrangement. Each specimen was built as a low-relief sculpture in Padico air-dry stone clay, a material already familiar from other work, then painted in acrylic and set against an interior-style birch panel ground.

Beauty here was never meant to be simple decoration, though. The design carried a second layer beneath that calm register, kept deliberately minor. Alongside the disciplined specimen grid, broken and damaged starfish were folded in among the intact ones, and subtle deviations in orientation and spacing were introduced to stop the field reading as too uniform. Calm at first glance, closer looking rewarded with irregularity: get that balance wrong and the panel either flattens into pure decoration or tips into obvious disruption.

The means chosen to get there did not cooperate, and it took a long time to understand why. Early colour tests reached for reds and blues that produced a candy-like pastel effect, entirely wrong for the register the panel needed. The palette had to be moved toward mineral tones instead, to stay compatible with the coastal-interior aesthetic the panel was built to sit within. That correction solved one problem and created another: the mineral palette pulled steadily toward institutional coolness, away from the domestic warmth the panel had been meant to carry, and the drift stayed invisible for most of the making. It surfaced only once the piece was finished and there was nowhere left for it to go.

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

By then the panel sat entirely against my own aesthetic preferences, the earthy, warm palette of my own home, its birch-clad walls, its organic textures. Confidence in the construction itself never wavered. The uncertainty stayed in the colour and the eventual cool, institutional tone, and by the time the piece was finished, it was a body of work I did not like, made in service of a beauty I still believed the exhibition needed, even if it was not the beauty I would have chosen for myself. I made art I did not like.

Years working in gothic homewares had already taught a hard lesson: a piece can be entirely resolved, well made, coherent, intentional, and still be turned away because it does not sit inside somebody's aesthetic world. Someone once asked, standing in front of a piece, "who would have something like that in their home?" The answer was immediate: "I would. People like me. People who live in a different tonal world." Artistic purpose and personal aesthetic do not always align, and learning to work inside that tension, rather than resolve it away, became part of the inquiry rather than an obstacle to it.

It took finishing the panel, and sitting with both difficulties, to see the shape underneath them. Panel I had been calibrating several conditions at once: domestic familiarity, institutional authority, aesthetic appeal, recognisability, alignment with the wider arc of Zone 1, without any of them ranked against the others before the making began. Left unranked, one of them won by default, and in Panel I, institutional coolness won. Calibrating beauty, it turned out, requires a hierarchy of artistic intentions fixed before the making starts, because criteria held equally get taken over by whichever one is structurally strongest.

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

A further insight only became visible once Panel I was standing finished in the studio. The monkey brittle star's unfamiliarity meant the panel had been leaning on beauty to do more work than a more recognisable species would have required, and a single aesthetic, however carefully calibrated, was never going to satisfy every viewer who stood in front of it. I realised this was not a failure, but one version of beautiful among several possible ones. From lived experience rather than theory, I understood that if three people stood in front of three different panels of brittle stars, each would likely gravitate toward a different one, not because one is better made than the others, but because each would hold a different idea of beauty. One version of beauty could not operate as an entry point for every viewer. Another panel, carrying a different register entirely, was going to be needed.

Three insights came out of Panel I, and they now govern how every panel since has been approached.

• First, calibrating beauty requires a hierarchy of artistic intentions. Multiple criteria cannot be held equally; one will dominate by default, and that dominance stays invisible until the work is finished.
• Second, artistic purpose and personal aesthetic do not always align, and learning to work inside that tension, rather than resolve it away, became part of the inquiry itself.
• Third, completing Panel I did not prompt another attempt at Panel I. It prompted Panel II, and the recognition that beauty itself would need more than one register if different viewers were going to find their way in through it.

That recognition led me to create the series Gathered with Care: Brittle Stars Panels I, II and III, asking what happens when beauty itself is built deliberately across registers, each a different idea of beautiful, each a different door into the same room, each changing how I think about beauty.