How Much of Our Art Never Gets Seen?

I’ve been digging through my archive lately—nearly two decades of images, sketches, shoots, and fragments. Thousands of files. Whole bodies of work. Some finished, some abandoned halfway through. Most of it hasn’t seen the light of day in years. Some of it never made it beyond the shutter click or the export folder.

Even now, most of it lives in digital limbo—buried in old drives, half-forgotten cloud folders, or storage I haven’t opened in years. I have a good cloud deal, sure. But what does that mean if the work just… sits there?

It makes me wonder: how much great art never gets seen?

How much beauty, truth, risk, or experimentation remains tucked away—not because it wasn’t good enough, but because we didn’t have the platform, the confidence, or the context to show it?

As artists, we live in an age where visibility is everything—and yet, visibility is filtered through algorithms, performance metrics, community guidelines, and commercial sensibilities. We choose platforms to represent ourselves on, but those platforms come with rules—spoken and unspoken. Some work feels “too much” or “too niche” or “not aligned with the brand.” And so it stays hidden.

Is this self-censorship? Strategic editing? A survival instinct? Maybe a bit of all three.

But I keep thinking: what would it look like to bring more of that hidden work to light—not just to show it, but to honour it? To make peace with the imperfect, the unresolved, the vulnerable, the raw?

I don’t know the answer yet. But I’m starting by opening the archive. And maybe, little by little, letting the unseen be seen.