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

The 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 was about 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, one continuous panel of around two hundred and fifty crabs, mounted in clear perspex instead of the black-backed boxes I'd used originally, because the black enclosure was flattening the whole piece. What that change actually produced, once light started passing through the perspex and throwing the crabs' shadows across the wall, wasn't something I designed, I found it. 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 perspex Exhibition: Yarra Sculpture Gallery June 2026.

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.

The jellyfish were an observation, beauty simply worked, before I'd decided to use it on purpose. The crabs were a deliberate extension of that observation, built specifically to find a second, different way in. The brittle stars pushed it further again and turned the question itself into the work: not just would beauty draw someone in, but which beauty, for which person, and how could one single panel ever make that choice for everyone.

Put all three artworks together and beauty stopped meaning one single approach.

It meant delicacy and nostalgia in the jellyfish, cuteness and repetition in the crabs, and material credibility, formal order and museum authority running right through all three. Domestic familiarity did part of the work, institutional restraint did another part, and no single one of these was carrying the whole job on its own. No single aesthetic register was ever going to reach every person who walked through the door.

I didn't have a name for any of this beyond instinct for a long time. What the jellyfish, the crabs and the brittle stars were each doing, differently, eventually got a name, fluency, the condition that lets a viewer find their own way into a work before I ask anything of them. That word came after the practice asked me to understand the path I had taken, not before it.

None of this was ever about making eco-art pretty for its own sake. It was about whether someone who walks in through delight, through museum polish, through a childhood memory of a beach, is still there, still looking, once the work asks something harder of them. That question doesn't get answered in the first room.

It only gets answered by whether someone stays long enough to reach whatever comes after it.