Insight 10: Why Eco-Awareness Wasn’t Enough for Me

A lot of ecological art is genuinely beautiful, and some of it has stopped me in my tracks. Recovered plastic turned into something luminous, ghost net reworked into form, waste material given scale and visual authority it never had sitting in a landfill. I don’t take any of that lightly, and the question I’m about to describe isn’t a complaint about that work.

My dissatisfaction with some ecological art has been around for years, long before I had useful language for it. I could look at work made from recovered plastic, discarded fishing gear or other environmental waste and understand exactly what I was being shown. The material was harmful. The problem was real. The work might be technically impressive, culturally important or visually arresting, and I could still come away thinking: yes, I know. What has actually changed for me?

For a long time, that was a difficult position to explain without sounding as though I was dismissing the artwork itself. Ghost-net sculpture is an obvious example for me because the material carries such a direct environmental story. I can see the net, understand that it has been recovered from the marine environment, recognise the damage it can cause and appreciate what has been made from it. None of that is trivial. But I kept getting stuck on the distance between understanding the problem and feeling that my own position had shifted in any meaningful way.

At the time, my language was much clumsier than that.

When I tried to talk about this with other artists, I was probably closer to saying, 'So what is the point?' Unsurprisingly, that produced pushback. The response was often some version of: raising awareness is important, making waste visible is important, getting people to care is important. I did not disagree with any of that, but I still felt dissatisfied, and because I could not separate my question from a judgement about the quality or value of the artwork, the conversation tended to go nowhere.

That dissatisfaction was already sitting underneath Fragile Futures when I began developing the exhibition. I was very clear that I did not want to make another version of: here is a pile of waste, look how bad this is, feel sad about it. I was working with 3D-printing waste precisely because I was already implicated in producing it. The contradiction was not somewhere else, in an industry or behaviour I could conveniently condemn. It was sitting on my studio floor.

That changed the question for me. I was no longer interested only in whether the work could make waste visible. I wanted the encounter to get closer to the uncomfortable fact that these environmental systems are not separate from us, even when the material itself looks distant, industrial or somebody else's problem. Fragile Futures began developing around that instinct before I had a neat vocabulary for what I was trying to distinguish.

Pic above: The Waste Engine, Fragile Futures.

The useful language came later.

A recent conversation with my mentor, Meg Viney, made me realise how much difference that language now makes. We were looking at a large-scale artwork made from agricultural hay-bale plastic, woven into something beautiful and materially impressive. I had seen this kind of work before and historically my reaction would have been blunt: it is a fantastic example of plastic waste, but what difference does it make to me? Would the people using that plastic necessarily do anything differently because the artwork exists?

This time I could explain the question without dismissing the work. I could acknowledge what it did strongly: it made the waste material present, transformed it, gave it scale and visual authority, and made an agricultural waste stream difficult to ignore. Then I could ask a different question: what happens after I recognise the material? Does the encounter remain about the waste in front of me, or does it begin to disturb the comfortable distance between that waste and my own participation in the systems around it?

Meg immediately understood the distinction. Her response was essentially: yes, what would I do differently? Nothing.

I am not using that answer as a test of whether the artwork succeeds or fails. That is precisely the trap I was falling into years ago. A work can be an excellent material statement, an important act of environmental visibility, or a powerful cultural object without doing the particular job I am now interested in researching. The difference is that I can finally talk about those things separately.

That has also changed the way I look at ecological art more generally. I am less inclined to poke at a work because it stops at material awareness, and more interested in asking what kind of encounter it is actually offering. Sometimes making the problem visible may be exactly the point. Sometimes beauty, grief, cultural memory or material transformation may be the strongest thing the work can do. My own research simply starts from a more demanding personal question.

What happens after I know?

That question has been there since the beginning of Fragile Futures, even though the language around it has changed considerably. I wanted to make work that did more than point at an environmental problem from a safe distance. I wanted to see whether sculpture could make that distance less comfortable, without turning the work into an instruction manual or telling viewers what they should think.

I still care about awareness. I just no longer confuse awareness with recognising my own place in it.

Read Insight 05 — What Is 3D-Printing Waste, Actually?

Pic below: Fragile Futures, Yarra Sculpture Gallery, June 2026.