Insight 08: When the Quiet Work Gets Lost

During my solo Fragile Futures exhibition at Meeniyan Art Gallery, I began to think that nobody liked the Brittle Stars.

Gathered with Care: Brittle Stars is a series of large wall panels built from repeated brittle-star forms arranged in grids, using the visual language of specimen display while exploring different aesthetic registers. They were not the works in the exhibition that generated the most obvious response, and because I was sitting with the exhibition and watching people encounter it, that absence of obvious response became difficult not to notice.

I remember watching my mentor, artist Meg Viney, make her way through the exhibition in the zig-zag way she tends to look at things, rather than following a neat sequence. The Brittle Stars came towards the end of that journey, and I eventually asked her to review them. At the time I was still trying to work out what the quieter response meant. I knew the panels were behaving differently from some of the other works, but I did not yet have a useful way to describe that difference.

What stayed with me was the uncertainty. Was quietness evidence that the work was not holding attention, or was I simply expecting attention to look more visible than it actually does?

Pic above: Installation at Meeniyan Gallery, April 2026.

When I exhibited all three panels together later at Yarra Sculpture Gallery, the question returned in a clearer way.

The Brittle Stars sat within a much larger Fragile Futures installation beside works with more immediate presence through scale, drama or overt beauty, including Self-Made Relics, the totems, Taxonomies of Absence and the Irony Specimens. The contrast made the Brittle Stars feel quieter again, but this time I had the advantage of being able to sit with the exhibition and watch what visitors actually did rather than relying only on my first impression of the work in the room.

The Yarra audience was small, so I do not want to make more of the observations than the exhibition can support. What I did see, consistently enough to interest me, was that visitors did not simply pass the panels by. They stopped, paused and stared, usually without accompanying conversation. Each panel had its own descriptive plaque, yet viewers consistently read only one of the three before moving on. It was a peculiar kind of evidence because it was so quiet. There was no easy verbal response for me to collect, and intervening to ask why someone was standing there would have changed the encounter I was trying to observe.

So I kept watching.

Pic above: installation at Yarra Sculpture Gallery, June 2026.

The more I watched, the less comfortable I became with my original conclusion that the works were being lost.

They were certainly operating at a lower volume than the works around them, but lower volume was not the same as absence. The attention looked different. It was slower, less conversational and harder for me to read from across the room, which may be why I had initially interpreted it as weak attention at all.

That distinction interested me because it exposed something about how easily an artist can privilege the responses that are easiest to see. If a work produces conversation or a clear emotional reaction, the engagement announces itself. Quiet looking is less obliging. It gives very little back to the artist in the moment, even when the viewer is staying with the work.

By Yarra, I had begun to think that the Brittle Stars might be offering a calm within Fragile Futures rather than disappearing inside it. I am still careful with that conclusion because 'contemplative' can become a flattering word applied after the fact to any work that receives a subdued response. Observation alone cannot tell me what someone was thinking while they stood there, and Yarra's low attendance makes the evidence provisional. What I can say is that the same quiet register appeared often enough for me to stop treating it automatically as a deficit.

Pic above: installation at Yarra Sculpture Gallery, June 2026.

The unresolved part is whether that calm is actually useful.

There is a difference between recognising that a work has a quieter function and deciding how much exhibition space that function deserves. After seeing the three panels together, I no longer think Fragile Futures needs all three of them. I have reduced the series going forward to one panel, and I do not intend to show the three together again. That decision does not come from deciding that the Brittle Stars failed, but from questioning the amount of real estate required to make their contribution.

One panel may be enough to create the pause without asking the exhibition to remain in that register for an extended stretch of wall. That feels more proportionate to what I observed, although I am interested to see whether the reading changes again once the work is shown that way.

The useful shift for me was not learning that quiet work is secretly successful, because I do not know that. It was learning that I had been too quick to equate quietness with being lost. Sitting with the work across two exhibitions made that assumption visible, and once I saw it, I could make a more deliberate decision about what place the Brittle Stars should occupy within the larger exhibition.

I now think they offered a calm I had not fully recognised at first. I am still deciding whether that calm is essential, incidental, or simply enough to warrant one panel rather than three.

Pic below: The single Brittle Star panel to remain in Fragile Futures - the first one I made, and an artwork I did not like.

Read Insight 04 — What Changed When the Work Left the Studio