Insight 07: When an Artwork Explains Too Much

There is a particular kind of criticism that artists are taught to take seriously: the work is too literal, too resolved, too easy to read. I understand the concern because I have had it about my own work, particularly Self-Made Relics, a series of small sculptural figures enclosed in glass vessels and surrounded by 3D-printing waste. The figures inhabit recognisable emotional states, and the titles make those states more explicit: Despair, Acceptance, Hope, Oblivious, Drowning. There is not a great deal of ambiguity about what emotional territory the viewer has entered.

That directness has made Self-Made Relics one of the more complicated bodies of work for me to assess. In academically oriented art contexts, I have encountered the view that it is too resolved or too literal, that the emotional proposition closes too quickly and leaves too little interpretive space. Some curatorial contexts can have a similar difficulty, particularly with explicitly emotional works such as Despair or Drowning.

Yet the response I repeatedly observe from general audiences is almost the reverse. People approach the works easily, recognise the emotional state almost immediately, and then begin to use that recognition as a way into something else.

They do not have to solve the figure before they can enter the work. They already know what despair looks like, or what it might feel like to be trapped, overwhelmed or resigned, and that familiarity appears to give them somewhere to stand. From there, their attention often moves to the material around the figure. What is all of that waste? Why is the person inside it? Is it consuming them, supporting them, trapping them, or something they have produced themselves?

Pic above:  Self-Made Relic - Drowning

The emotional state is legible, but the encounter is not necessarily finished.

When I developed Self-Made Relics, I was deliberately leaning into a more literal attempt to make waste implication visible. The wider Fragile Futures exhibition contains works that operate more indirectly through specimen display, repetition, altered biological forms, absence and material contradiction. Self-Made Relics brings a recognisable human body directly into that system. Instead of asking the viewer to infer human consequence from marine forms or waste structures, it places a body inside the residue of making and gives that body an emotional condition.

What I did not yet understand was what that directness would do once the work met different audiences. In exhibition observations, Self-Made Relics has consistently generated strong personal and emotional engagement. Viewers identify individual emotional states, choose favourites, talk about vulnerability and entrapment, and sometimes use the figures as a way to speak about their own experience. The work becomes personally available very quickly.

Pic above: Work-in-progress, making a Self-Made Relic

For some viewers, that ease is precisely the strength of the work.

The interesting part is that immediate emotional recognition does not always end the encounter. I have watched people understand the figure almost instantly and then continue looking, particularly at the waste. The human form gives them an emotional position they can recognise, while the synthetic residue surrounding it complicates what that position means. The waste is excessive, fabricated and accumulated, and its relationship to the figure is difficult to separate from ideas of consumption, pressure and consequence.

This shifted how I thought about interpretive openness. I had been treating unresolved meaning almost as if it were a universal measure of sophistication: the less quickly a work could be resolved, the more room it had to continue operating. There is truth in that, particularly when ambiguity sustains uncertainty rather than simply causing confusion. But Self-Made Relics exposed a limit in the assumption. A work can be easy to enter without being exhausted by that entry.

The academic critique is still useful because there is a real risk here. If every part of an artwork confirms the same reading, the viewer has nowhere else to go. A despairing figure called Despair, visibly overwhelmed by material that reads only as threatening waste, can move toward illustration rather than encounter. Once the emotional state, the material and the title all point toward one fixed conclusion, the work may have explained itself before the viewer has had an opportunity to negotiate their own position.

I do not think Self-Made Relics entirely escapes that risk. Some works within the series sit closer to that edge than others. The same characteristic can register as accessibility in one setting and over-resolution in another.

Curatorial response often sits between those positions. The series has immediate visual and emotional salience, which can be useful because viewers understand very quickly that there is a human stake inside the material proposition. At the same time, its direct emotional register can narrow where the work feels appropriate, particularly when a curator is looking for a less declared or more ambiguous encounter.

Pic above: early prototype of Self-Made Relic

The obvious response would be to make the work less literal. I am not convinced that would necessarily improve it. If I removed the recognisable emotional state, softened the titles, obscured the figure or made the material relationship harder to read, I might create more interpretive openness, but I could also remove the mechanism that currently allows many viewers to enter the work and project themselves into it.

That would solve one problem by creating another.

What the audience observations have made visible is that accessibility is not simply a concession to viewers who are less academically art literate. It changes the structure of the encounter. A viewer who immediately recognises despair does not necessarily stop at despair. Recognition can become the point from which they begin to think about why the figure is engulfed, what the waste signifies, and how the emotional state might connect to systems of consumption and consequence.

The question, then, is not simply whether an artwork is literal. It is what the literalness does after the first reading has occurred.

Does it close the work, or does it establish enough familiarity for another question to begin?

For Self-Made Relics, my answer remains mixed. The work sits close to premature closure because its emotional symbolism is explicit, and that is a genuine limitation. At the same time, repeated audience observation suggests that the same explicitness creates unusually strong personal access, and that viewers often continue from emotional recognition into curiosity about material, waste and human implication.

The work may explain one part of itself very quickly. The more useful question is whether it explains everything.

Pic above: 3d-printing Self-Made Relic