Insight 06: Why I Needed a Framework for my Art Practice

I created the Recognition Framework to help me make better, more purposeful artwork. That's the plain answer. Getting there took months of work across several fronts at once, and it started with a much smaller, more frustrating problem: not being able to say why a piece wasn't working.

Making Gathered with Care: Brittle Stars, I kept reaching for things that felt intuitively right, arrangement, colour, restraint, without being able to describe why. When a version fell short of what I intended, I had reactions but no real explanation. It was too flat, too decorative, not quite right.

All useful as instinct. All useless as an account of what had actually gone wrong.

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Pic below: Gathered with Care: Brittle Stars I, II, III

What built the framework wasn't one big insight. It was several things happening at once over the following months, each making the others harder to ignore. I was watching work behave differently once it left the studio, reading theory that gave language to things I had already been doing by instinct, and looking closely at other artists' work as well as my own. Böhme, Ngai and Bennett helped clarify parts of what I was seeing, but none of that let me get away with “well, this one works” as an explanation anymore.

Running through all of this was something I had been doing for years without ever really treating it as method: watching viewers. I had spent enough time standing in exhibitions to notice which works people stopped for, which they walked past, what they wrote in guest books and, just as importantly, what they never mentioned at all. Once I started paying attention to those patterns deliberately, that habit became some of the most useful evidence I had.

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Pic below: Fragile Futures, Meeniyan Art Gallery, April 2026.

This did not organise itself by accident. I spent months deliberately collecting studio notes, observations, visitor responses, research and reading, partly because I was preparing for a Masters and wanted to know I could actually argue for what I was doing rather than reconstruct it later from memory.

What it actually gave me, the thing I hadn't found in a form I could use, was a way to ask myself real questions about my own artwork. Initially I started doing that retrospectively, working out after the fact why a finished piece had or hadn't done what I wanted. Eventually, as I built up the framework, it became something I could use prospectively - asking a piece what it's actually for, both before and while I am still making it, not just once I'm standing in front of the result trying to explain it.

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Pic below: Concept sketches for Material Pathways, asking myself what does it actually achieve?

It hasn't made me immune to making something I don't like. Panel I of Gathered with Care is actually where the fluency exploration began, the first place I was consciously asking what lets a viewer into a piece at all, well before term 'fluency' existed as a real concept rather than just a felt problem. I still wasn't happy with the panel once it was finished, not fully understanding why it let me down other than a feeling. It took the framework which was built out of that same question, for me to go back and understand why, instead of leaving it filed away as just a bad day in the studio.

I don't think the lesson is that every artist needs a framework, or a year of research, or a stack of theory before instinct becomes useful. Mine was simply the route I needed to understand my own practice more clearly.

Understanding why and what you're actually trying to make tends to produce a clearer, less cluttered result.

I got there by paying close attention for long enough, and thinking hard enough about what kept repeating, that the observations eventually became something I could use before and during making, not only afterwards.

I created the Recognition Framework to help me make better, more purposeful artwork. That's still the whole answer.