Insight 12: What Strategy Taught Me About Making Art

Strategy has given me one of the things I value most in my art practice: confidence to follow an idea far enough to find out whether it has real substance. My corporate career trained me to observe carefully, recognise patterns, test assumptions and stay comfortable changing direction when something more interesting appears, and those habits have transferred into the studio almost seamlessly.

Observation shapes a lot of what I do. I pay attention to the opportunities that appear, the materials that hold my interest, the questions that keep returning, and the directions that seem to have enough depth to sustain me. I do not feel I need to force a path on myself. When something genuinely excites me, I can follow it, then use the strategic part of my brain to look more broadly at what might be possible.

Pic above: Designing Material pathways artwork.

That is how 3D-printing waste entered my practice. I did not decide that I needed a new ecological subject and then go looking for one. I noticed the waste, became interested in it, and kept looking. The more I looked, the more threads appeared: the material itself, the environmental contradiction, the hidden waste streams around desktop printing, the sculptural possibilities, the wider community conversation, and its potential to become part of my environmental activism. The observation was already pulling me in that direction.

Strategy then helped me work out whether the curiosity had enough runway.

Once I became interested, I looked around the problem from several directions, much as I would have done professionally. What was already being done? What was not being done? Was this simply a material novelty that would entertain me for six months, or was there enough complexity to keep me mentally and creatively engaged for several years? I could see fairly quickly that there was enough there to sustain research, making, community engagement and exhibition development without exhausting the subject.

That broader systems view has probably been one of the most useful transfers from my previous career. I am comfortable holding several variables at once, recognising patterns, pushing assumptions, researching, writing and synthesising until I have a clearer sense of what matters. It also gives me confidence in my own judgement because I know I have usually done a fairly robust amount of work behind an opinion, while still being willing to pull back if I discover that the gap I thought I had found is already well occupied or simply not very interesting.

I think of myself as a gap follower. I am interested in the places where there seems to be room to ask something differently, and I am comfortable making my own path into that territory rather than waiting for somebody else to define it first.

Pic above: Multi-tasking .. Taxonomies on the left, Brittlestars on the right.

The same confidence can also make it very easy to create the outcome before the artwork exists.

Fragile Futures is a good example. I was able to plan ahead, book galleries, create deadlines and build the professional structure of an exhibition before I had made anything like the body of work I eventually wanted it to contain. At the time, that was deliberate. I had almost no contemporary portfolio and needed to move from zero to something quickly enough that people could actually see what I was trying to build, so strategy gave me the confidence to create the runway first and then make into it.

I still think that was the right decision. Instead of waiting several years to become exhibition-ready, I now have gallery relationships, an established project and somewhere for the work to go as it develops. The trade-off was that the exhibition could start leading the making. I made three Brittle Stars panels because the exhibition needed work, and I am now only retaining one of them while the material questions I find more interesting, such as the microplastics work, are beginning to open into much richer territory.

The difference now is that I do not need to keep moving at that first-year pace. The infrastructure exists, which means I can slow down and allow the material, the making and the questions themselves to lead more of the next phase rather than always making toward an exhibition requirement.

My corporate career was highly commercial, so I am naturally alert to audience, viability, positioning and where an idea might lead. That instinct sits alongside an artistic identity I have carried for most of my life, rather than replacing it, and I am mindful not to let the commercial and strategic training start contriving the work toward an outcome before the studio has had enough freedom to discover one. The pull is there because the training is there; the useful part now is knowing when to let it lead and when to get out of the way.

Another part of that training is my need to understand why.

I did not set out to build a framework. I kept asking questions because I wanted to understand the distinctions I was noticing in ecological art and in my own practice, and eventually the framework emerged from that. It gave me language, structure and clearer purpose at a point when I felt I was beginning from very little theoretical literacy, and it has helped me progress in a more consciously structured way.

At the same time, I remain alert to the possibility that structure can become too eager to know where the work is going. Asking why, defining purpose and building a framework could easily crowd out experimentation if I let them arrive too early, so that is something I watch rather than something I regard as solved. So far, I still feel I am allowing enough experimentation: happy accidents happen, materials behave differently from the plan, and I change direction when something better appears.

That balance matters because, at this point in my life, I am not trying to return to making aesthetically pleasing work without a larger purpose. I know I have that capacity already, and what interests me now is using the opportunity I have to ask more of the practice without structuring it so tightly that the work loses its ability to surprise me.

The strategic and intellectual part of my practice is still hungry too. A long career in forward thinking, human-centred design, achieving outcomes and solving complex problems does not simply disappear because the formal day job has gone, and those capabilities still have plenty of places they could go, whether through an MFA, the Insights, a book, advisory roles, deeper participation in the arts community, or simply the way I continue to work in the studio. I do not feel the need to decide now which of those paths should carry the most weight because there are enough opportunities opening that I can let the next direction emerge while still recognising where my skills and curiosity might be useful.

That may be the most useful thing strategy has taught me in art: have enough foresight to recognise the possible paths, while staying malleable enough to follow the one that actually opens.

Read more on Insight 02: When Optimisation Flattened the Work.