Insight 03: Why Begin with Beauty in Eco-Art?
Dina GoebelThe first real evidence that beauty could do serious work in this project came from the jellyfish I made and exhibited as Irony Specimens, during a joint exhibition called Vitamin Sea with a friend of mine who painted colorful seascapes.
Vitamin Sea joint Exhibition with Jacqui Christians, Stockyard Gallery, Foster Jan 2026
The delicate marine forms in glass domes and shadow boxes, made using 3D printing, was my move away from years working in gothic homewares. The irony was these were objects about preservation and care, and yet, they were being made from the exact material consequence they seemed to be protecting against. And people wanted them. They became prize winning, sought after, and the Moon Jellyfish sold quickly as a Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize finalist.
Irony Specimens jellyfish from left: Moon Jellyfish, Lions Mane Jellyfish, Bluebottle.
Watching people in front of the work was telling. Nothing about the jellyfish is hidden, the resin is right there if anyone looks closely, and people were genuinely drawn into the material without ever drawing a conclusion about the irony of it, unless something outside the object, a title, the rest of the exhibition, or my artist talk, told them to go looking for one. Bottom line, the jellyfish were an attractive lure.
None of that attraction depended on ecology.
Through experience, I already understood that beautiful objects pulled people in, long before I'd turned that pull into a deliberate strategy for purpose. The material irony and the sheer volume of resin 3D-printing waste each left behind became impossible to keep ignoring. The jellyfish were doing the attracting ... they were never going to do the recognising as well, and that distinction turned out to matter more than almost anything else in this whole project.
Irony specimens - 3D-printing waste was accumulating.
Once I had observed that in front of real viewers, I knew what Zone 1 of Fragile Futures needed to be. Beauty would be the lure. It would open the exhibition, the entry condition a viewer would meet before I asked anything harder of them.
The soldier crabs came next.
Pressed by Desire was a deliberate decision rather than intuitively following my fingerprint of beauty the way the jellyfish had. Soldier crabs pull on a completely different kind of memory to the jellyfish, nothing like museum specimen appeal, just the plain, physical memory of watching them move across the sand in their hundreds as a kid at Wilsons Promontory. Each individual crab stays completely recognisable and likeable on its own, but put a couple of hundred of them together into one dense cast field and something else starts happening, the appeal tips from delight in an individual form into something closer to pressure, and you feel it before you could ever explain it.
I started the work as small shadow boxes and rebuilt it later at hero scale. Cuteness, nostalgia, repetition, accumulation, a second route into the same territory the jellyfish had already opened, and this time I built it on purpose.
Pressed by Desires: Soldier Crabs in a black shadow box.
Gathered with Care: Brittle Stars followed.
Gathered with Care: Brittle Stars came after both of these works, and it's where I pushed the idea of 'lure of beauty' furthest. Three panels, designed in three completely different aesthetic registers, one cool and institutional, one warm and domestic, one earthy and organic, testing whether different viewers would actually gravitate toward different panels for different reasons.
Gathered with care: Brittle Stars panels I, II & III Exhibition: Yarra Sculpture Gallery, June 2026
None of this was one formula getting repeated three times.
That became clearer the more I looked back across the three works. The jellyfish had shown me, almost accidentally, that delicacy and beauty could hold attention before anyone understood the ecological contradiction underneath them. The soldier crabs let me push that observation somewhere else entirely, into cuteness, memory and repetition, and by the time I reached the brittle stars I was deliberately testing how far different aesthetic worlds could pull different people toward the same exhibition.
What interested me was not that all three were beautiful.
They weren't beautiful in the same way, and that turned out to be the point.
One person might be pulled in by the glass-domed polish of the jellyfish, someone else by the familiar little blue crabs, someone else by the order and restraint of the brittle stars. I had spent years thinking about beauty as though I needed to find the right version of it for the exhibition, when the work was quietly showing me something more useful: there probably wasn't one.
That changed the question.
Instead of asking whether beauty could attract a viewer, I started asking what kind of beauty might attract which viewer, and how many different ways into the exhibition I might actually need. The answer was never going to be a single aesthetic register doing all the work.
I didn't have a name for that at the time. Later, I began calling these entry conditions fluency, but the term came after the practice had already made the problem obvious. The work had found the distinction before I had language for it.
None of this was ever about making eco-art pretty for its own sake. It was about whether someone who came in through delight, familiarity, museum polish or a childhood memory of the beach might still be there, still looking, once the work asked something harder of them.
That question doesn't get answered by the first object.
It gets answered by whether they stay long enough to reach whatever comes after it.