Insight 18: The Exhibition Ideas I Threw Away

Before Fragile Futures became the exhibition it is now, I had planned almost everything. Artwork concepts, materials, collaborators, galleries, curators, audience participation, measures of impact and an environmental narrative were all mapped across an enormous digital whiteboard. The exhibition did not yet exist, but its entire ecosystem did.

I imagined a participatory coral reef, a disappearing school of fish, large jellyfish suspended from the ceiling, a life-sized kelp installation, fictional marine specimens affected by pollution, kintsugi repair, interactive elements, QR codes, workshops and ways of measuring whether anyone changed their behaviour afterwards.

The problem was not that I had too few ideas. I had enough ideas for several exhibitions, a public program and possibly a small environmental organisation.

The participatory reef is probably the clearest example. I imagined tea chests filled with 3D-printing waste that people could pick through, selecting pieces and placing them into a growing coral reef. Visitors could also bring in their own printing waste, so the work would become both an accumulating installation and a recycling opportunity. As it grew, I would return to adhere pieces, tidy the inclusions and gradually draw all those individual contributions into something beautiful.

I did not abandon that idea because I decided participation was artistically wrong, or because I suddenly disliked the thought of people helping to make the work. I parked it because I was an unknown artist trying to find a way into galleries. I had no curatorial support, no funding and no established relationship with a venue prepared to accommodate a changing participatory installation. At that point, I needed to build credibility before I could ask a gallery to take on the practical complications of the idea.

My appetite and my infrastructure were not the same size.

That was also true of the large hanging jellyfish and the other installation-scale possibilities. I like making large. I still want the physical reach and atmosphere that large work can create, but scale brings storage, transport, engineering, installation and money with it. It also requires curators willing to back the work before it has an exhibition history. A university studio and the institutional support surrounding an MFA might have made some of that possible. Without that structure, it is a difficult trajectory to sustain at this stage of my life and practice.

So those ideas were not failures, and they were not exactly rejected. They were deferred. That matters, because hindsight can make the development of an exhibition look much cleaner than it was. It is easy to look at the finished structure and imagine that every earlier possibility was removed because I had reached a more sophisticated artistic position. Some were removed for that reason. Others simply exceeded what I could realistically support.

A different group of ideas did fall away as my thinking changed. The earliest version of the project was much more explicitly educational. I wanted to reveal the hidden waste of 3D printing, encourage recycling and potentially measure changes in awareness or behaviour. QR codes could provide waste data. Workshops could invite action. Surveys and interviews could tell me whether the message had worked. The exhibition could move from ecological beauty, through damage, and then towards repair or hope.

None of that was unreasonable. It was simply becoming less like the exhibition I was actually making.

What did remain important was my desire to tell a story. I wanted the exhibition to feel like a journey of discovery, where one encounter altered how the next was understood. In that sense, I never abandoned education. I changed how I wanted it to happen. Rather than placing all the information in front of the viewer and directing them towards a response, I wanted understanding to unfold through the sequence of the exhibition itself.

By the time I wrote the first zone reflections, that journey had become quite clear. Beauty would provide the lure in the first zone. The second would bring the waste and our relationship to it into recognition. Once those two parts were established, I turned my mind to the obvious next question: and so now what?

Pic above: Fragile Futures zone concepts, late 2025.

That is where the reassuring ending became difficult. I cannot predict the future, and neither can anyone else. There are things we can influence and things we can contribute to, but there are also environmental, political, technological and economic forces well beyond individual control. To finish the exhibition with a neat repair strategy would have suggested a certainty I did not believe.

I cannot remember one dramatic moment when I threw out the ending. The early records suggest that the change happened during a concentrated period of development, but in my mind it was progressive. I worked through the exhibition logically and sequentially, intensifying each part as its purpose became clearer. Attraction first. Recognition next. Then the future, which could only remain open.

Pic above: Fragile Futures zone structure, July 2026.

Uncertainty was not the absence of an answer. It was the most honest answer I had.

Even here, however, not everything from the early ideas disappeared. Education remained through the labels, panel, brochures, conversations and other material surrounding the exhibition. Marine specimens remained. Disappearing species remained. The transformation of waste remained fundamental. The human figure developed into Self-Made Relics. Ideas that had begun as activities, symbols or explanations were sometimes reduced, relocated or absorbed into the artworks themselves.

Looking back, I can now see three quite different things happening inside what I had casually thought of as throwing ideas away. Some ideas were rejected because they led towards an exhibition that felt too instructional. Some changed form as the work became more precise. Some are still perfectly viable, but are waiting for the practical conditions that would allow me to make them properly.

This is perhaps the less romantic part of developing an arts practice. An exhibition is shaped by what I believe, what the work reveals and what I can actually bring into the world. Those conditions do not always agree. The finished exhibition is not a pure record of the best ideas winning. It is also a record of timing, access, money, scale, support and the credibility I am still building.

I still love that coral reef. I can picture people sorting through chests of strange plastic structures and adding their small piece to something that grows across an exhibition. Perhaps I did not throw that idea away at all.

Perhaps I just cannot make it yet.

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

Related Insight 10: Why Eco-Awareness Wasn’t Enough for Me - a companion reflection on why environmental information alone could not create the kind of encounter I wanted Fragile Futures to become.

Pic below: Mind Map September 2025.