If you have been following my work for a while, you may have noticed that I have suddenly started writing quite a lot.

There is a reason for that.

When I began developing Fragile Futures, I realised fairly early that I was about to invest a significant amount of time in something that was becoming much more than the development of an exhibition. I was asking questions about materials, environmental art, attraction, audience response, consumer desire and how artworks communicate their intent, and I wanted to understand those questions properly rather than simply make the work and move on.

So I started documenting the journey, and fairly quickly the documentation stopped being simply a record of what I was doing. Writing down studio decisions, exhibition observations, audience responses and unresolved questions began feeding back into the work itself, helping me see patterns, contradictions and new questions that I might otherwise have missed.

At first this meant the fairly practical things you might expect: photographs, studio notes, material experiments and records of why particular decisions were made. But it gradually expanded into exhibition observations, audience feedback, case studies of individual artworks, research into other artists and theory, and increasingly detailed reflections on what I was learning through making.

At around the same time, I realised that the level of inquiry I was undertaking could form the basis of an MFA research project. Because of the realities of funding, a research MFA was really the only viable postgraduate pathway for me, so I began approaching the documentation with that possibility in mind as well.

Whether that actually results in an MFA remains uncertain. I applied to two programs; one pathway has now closed, and I am still waiting to find out about the other.

But something quite valuable has happened regardless.

I now have somewhere in the vicinity of 70,000 words of research, studio observations, artwork development, exhibition findings and thinking sitting behind Fragile Futures. More importantly, those notes have become interconnected: observations made while making can now be compared with what happened in exhibition, with audience responses, and with the research that followed.

Some of it is formal, some less so, and quite a lot of it records ideas that changed considerably once they collided with an actual artwork.

I don't particularly want all of that to disappear into a folder simply because an MFA may or may not happen.

So, the Insights

The Insights series is my way of beginning to pull some of that thinking out of the archive and share it.

Rather than publishing the research itself, I am taking individual questions, discoveries and occasional mistakes from the journey and writing about them in a form that doesn't require anyone to know the theory, the framework or the history of Fragile Futures to understand them.

The Insights are not generated ideas looking for somewhere to land; they are distilled from things that have actually happened in the studio, exhibitions and research, then worked into a form I can share.

They are about things I have actually encountered through practice: what happened when I optimised an artwork until I flattened it, why beauty became more complicated than I expected, what changed when the work left the studio, why I started questioning whether environmental awareness was enough, and what I have learned from watching people encounter the work.

In other words, they are pieces of a much larger investigation, written while I am still inside it.

There may eventually be enough here for a book. Whether I have the stamina to turn 70,000 words of notes into one is another question entirely.

For now, I would rather start sharing what I am learning than wait until I know what its final destination will be. If the MFA happens, this body of work will travel with me. If it doesn't, the research still has value, and Fragile Futures will continue developing regardless.

Perhaps that is the more important thing I have realised through documenting all of this: research doesn't become worthwhile because it earns a qualification, and the things learned through making don't have to remain hidden in the studio.

So, for the moment, I am writing Insights.

Read Insight 06 — Why I Needed a Recognition Framework