Insight 14: The Best Feedback Gave Me No Answers

When the curator walked through my ecological sculpture exhibition, Fragile Futures, at Yarra Sculpture Gallery, the feedback was positive. The installation was neat, professional and looked good; perhaps I could stretch it more by changing the footprint. I understood that as practical advice about the room, so I moved the tall Totems sculptures further into the gallery and gave them more space. I had heard the comment and acted on it, but only at the spatial level.

Pic above: Fragile Futures, Yarra Sculpture Gallery, June 2026.

The word neat returned.

The word neat returned during my RMIT interview for a proposed MFA. A potential supervisor was looking through a handful of portfolio images from the perspective of material inquiry when he observed that everything about what I was doing was very neat. “Use the Yarra gallery, get more messy with it, play with it more,” he suggested. He was also the only person who responded positively to my repetitive Brittle Stars wall panels, because he could see repetition as one of my core strengths; he thought my figurative Self-Made Relics series was over-resolved, which was okay as that was my plan.

He made statements, but then he asked questions, and that small difference opened my own inquiry rather than ending the conversation with his judgement.

It was the best feedback I have ever had in fifty years of being an artist!

Not because it was deep, automatically right, or free of his own material-inquiry lens, and it was only a forty-minute courtesy interview ... but because I had never had that kind of dialogue before. 

What remains difficult is that the conversation ended there. As an artist, I remain with a feeling of isolation about my practice and devoid of the quality of sustained feedback my practice now needs.

The neatness comment kept returning.

Recently, while looking at my work amongst nearly 300 entries for another exhibition, I now saw something new: mine was way too neat. Tight, crisp, tidy, clean, perfect.

I had already worried that I resolved my work too readily, which was why I initially sought a mentor, but I had been thinking about resolution as meaning or message. Now I am wondering whether, in my work, resolved might also mean neat. I do not know that they are the same thing, and I am certainly not going to manufacture messiness because some contemporary galleries prefer work that is more abstract, obtuse or open-ended. Neatness is also part of my aesthetic.

 The point is that I can finally see the question.

My mentor, artist Meg Viney, responded very differently to Lophelia Plancrntia, a recent sculptural work containing the ground 3D-printing waste I had only just begun exploring as a transformed material. I was particularly proud of it. Friends liked it, and it had gained good traction on Instagram, suggesting broader public interest, but Meg avoided giving me her response until I followed it up. She did not want to tell me that it did not work for her; it looked grey and dead and did not tell her anything. I was okay with the honesty, but I also said, “That’s okay, Meg, but your aesthetic is one of soft, ethereal and delicate, and this one does not suit you.” 

When we returned to the conversation, she spoke about the Apollonian and Dionysian qualities in my work, its duality and mystery, and we recognised that she was reading Lophelia through a different aesthetic position. I parked that feedback. I did not dismiss Meg, change the work or decide she was wrong ...

I simply did not experience the pause that tells me something has entered my own inquiry.

In that exchange, I think Meg had more pause for reflection than I did. Lophelia has not yet had meaningful public or exhibition critique, so her response may become more useful later, but at present it tells me more about aesthetic fit than it does about what the work needs.

Feedback, audiences or curatorial fit?

Much of the immediate liking, disliking and curatorial suitability I receive is really feedback about audience and curatorial fit. That information matters, and gratifying feedback always feels good too! But the other kind of feedback does not depend on whether I enjoy hearing it or whether I immediately take action.

It gives me pause for reflection.

Sometimes I hear it, make a practical adjustment and still do not understand it; sometimes it needs another person, another context or my own later comparison before a pattern emerges. That is also the lonely gap, because audiences, collectors, curators and mentors can each give me a partial reading, but sustained dialogue that follows a question across the practice is much harder to find.

Writing this through has already changed how I will listen.

I do not need feedback to tell me what to do, but I do need to notice what continues working on me after the conversation is over. The useful part may not be its authority, its immediacy or even its accuracy on first hearing. The benefit is the delay, the reflection and the patterns that begin to emerge as a result.

Read more in Insight 11: When is the Audience Right?

Pic below: Fragile Futures, Meeniyan Gallery, April 2026.