Insight 09: When Beauty and Discomfort Need Each Other

Totem 01 began in a place I know well, which is beauty. I liked the juxtaposition of rough 3D-printing waste embedded inside smooth resin panels, and I enjoyed the way the whole object held together through curvature, translucency, timber and an organic green palette. I had also built in references to kelp through the texture of the panels and the small round orange forms, so for me there was a quiet satisfaction in making something that carried a waste narrative while still feeling organic. The message was there, but it was almost indistinguishable from the form.

That softness suited me. Perhaps a little too well.

Pic above: Totem 1, fluidity with waste.

I have had to become more conscious of the fact that I naturally err toward aesthetic beauty, and when something starts to feel visually resolved my instinct is usually to protect that resolution. With Totem 01, I had to remind myself that if the work remained entirely smooth, coherent and pleasing, then the beauty could become the end of the encounter rather than the beginning of something more uncertain. I needed to introduce an element that did not quite belong, that is when I added the barnacles.

For me, that was a harder decision than it probably looks in the finished work because I was deliberately disrupting something I already liked. The barnacles interrupted the gentle flow of the totem and introduced a small point of discomfort and curiosity without turning the object into something aggressive. I still wanted the work to feel beautiful. I simply did not want beauty to resolve everything.

When Totem 01 was exhibited as part of Fragile Futures, the response was immediate enough that people repeatedly described it as the hero of the exhibition. I cannot reduce that response to one thing. The scale may have contributed, and the translucency, green palette and timber certainly gave the work a strong visual presence.

What interested me more, was that attraction did not seem to depend on viewers knowing exactly what they were looking at.

A lot of people read the form as sails or sailing ships. Some people saw kelp, but fewer. I had expected the kelp connection to be more apparent because it was so present for me in the making, through the curvature, texture and orange round forms, but that was not the dominant reading. Rather than bothering me, I found that useful. The work could attract people without immediately telling them what it was supposed to mean.

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

The same was true of the waste. Because the 3D-printing residue was embedded into the resin and absorbed into the surface language of the object, it was not necessarily obvious at first glance. Within the wider exhibition, and through closer looking, the material could become recognisable as waste, but it did not arrive as a label before the object had been encountered.

That gave me something I had been looking for without quite knowing how to name it.

Disruption did not have to cancel attraction.

A mentor later observed that this was one of the first works where I was not relying on beauty alone, and where the ecological proposition was not being made so didactically. That resonated because I had felt the same thing while making it. I had not abandoned beauty, which would have been artificial for my practice, but I had started to understand that beauty could remain active while something else pushed against it.

Totem 01 became useful to me because it showed that disruption did not have to cancel attraction. The barnacles could interrupt the flow without destroying it. The waste could remain partially disguised inside an organic-looking surface. The kelp reference could be present without requiring everyone to read it correctly. The work could still feel resolved enough to draw people in while retaining enough ambiguity that the reading did not close immediately.

I then began pushing that question harder in the subsequent totems. Rather than repeating the same gentle flow, I started introducing more disharmony and allowing the forms to become less comfortable. Totem 01 had shown me that attraction could survive some disruption, so the later works became a way of testing how far that could be pushed.

Pic above: Totem 04 with more compression and disruption.

I still do not know where the useful limit sits. Too little disruption and the work risks becoming aesthetically complete before anything more difficult has a chance to emerge. Too much, and I may lose the very quality that gives people a reason to approach in the first place. What Totem 01 gave me was not a formula, but a practical reference point for that tension.

Beauty did not need to disappear for discomfort to matter. It needed something to push against. 

Read Insight 03: Why Begin with Beauty in Eco-Art?