Dina Goebel - 'Fragile Futures'

Exhibition Overview — Fragile Futures | Dina Goebel

Fragile Futures is South Gippsland artist Dina Goebel’s evolving sculptural body of work that examines the emotional and ethical tension between consumerism and conservation. The work begins with attraction - forms that echo natural systems and organisms, inviting curiosity and care - before gently shifting the viewer into a space of unease, asking us to confront how precarious that beauty has become.

Using contemporary materials and processes, Goebel creates sculptural forms that reference preservation, display and containment - but these materials are intentionally “not neutral.” They sit inside the same systems that drive convenience, accumulation and environmental strain, placing the work’s central contradiction in full view: our desire to protect nature while remaining dependent on behaviours and materials that threaten it.

As the series unfolds, admiration gives way to quiet tension - suspended between care and consequence, hope and inevitability. Rather than offering solutions, Fragile Futures invites slow looking and reflection: What are we willing to preserve, and at what cost? What futures are we actively shaping through everyday choices?

Artist Biography

Dina Goebel is a mixed-media sculptural artist and creative entrepreneur based in South Gippsland, working from a studio in a restored 150-year-old settler’s cottage surrounded by rural landscape that continues to shape her practice. Her work combines natural elements, found or vintage objects and contemporary materials to create hybrid sculptural forms that balance beauty with unease, exploring humanity’s complex relationship with the natural world.

Predominantly self-taught, Dina has undertaken workshops across ceramics, sculpture, stone masonry and mosaic, alongside studies in Interior Design and Fine Art. She has a long creative history, including founding a functional art business in Brisbane (1997) and later establishing The ArTTable (2002), delivering creative experiences to communities across Australia, and exhibiting in both Queensland and Victoria. In mid-2025 she commenced Fragile Futures, which now forms the central focus of her practice, alongside producing gothic wares through ‘That Creative Feeling’ and beginning to engage in artist talks and advisory work on process, material ethics and the “conservation paradox.”