Laughing at Will French's current exhibition opens up serious considerations about a bleak future.

Mistaking the playfulness of Will French’s work as something skin-deep could well result in viewers missing everything.

The Sydney-based sculptor – although given he has no real preference for medium that’s a fairly loose description – produces art that sits alongside you and giggles as you stare into an abyss – before it shoves you in and waits to hear you hit the bottom.

Will’s work is undeniably funny. Past examples include a Scrabble rack balancing precariously on a walnut and kept there by the words “In” and “the”; his own gravestone made from terrazzo and inlaid in brass with “PTO”; and “This Will Never Last” painted in clouds above Sydney Harbour.

His latest work, on show at Hugo Michell Gallery until April 1 (better hurry), is a wooden walking trail sign – the type you find in national parks guiding trekkers from A to B.

But instead of useful direction, Will offers no help – filling the sign with gibberish-like lyrics from Little Richard’s 1957 hit Tutti Frutti.

That’s also funny of course, but typically, it simultaneously shoulders incredible weight. Look closely and you see the joke is on the verge of buckling under its own load.

“Gibberish is what governments give us,” Will says.

“They talk in circles and platitudes and catch-cries and they angle for short-term solutions to just perpetuate their ego, their power, their hold on the stakes.

“It (my work) is massively weighty. The problems I’m dealing with are those that are universal, the ones we all deal with – our place in the world, mortality, legacy, what we have to offer, what we have to take, how to maintain, relevance, happiness, love, understanding, some sort of resonance with a community – the big ones.

“And they have to be handled lightly otherwise it’s too foreboding to really even fathom.

“Humour is a really good way of navigating difficult subjects, so it’s quite common for someone to downplay the seriousness of a situation by making light of it – but in that also highlighting how dark and ominous that situation really is.

“The humour is definitely a treatment in order to allow the audience to engage with the work – the questions are unanswerable, they’re not even really intended to be answered they’re just meant to be considered.”

Will is “equal parts hopeful and terrified” about the future.

He’s sick of near-sighted governments and money’s ability to dictate to them. He’s sick of the “right thing to do being easily dissuaded by the cheaper”.

Also fuelling his fire is the state of Australia’s recently-radically-defunded art scene. While he has no issue with the quality of art being produced in Australia, he sees the broader Australian audience as a disinterested population and believes creating an Australia that values the arts would be a step towards a better future.

“If Australia develops its art audience then we develop a sustainable future for artists because we have audiences going to galleries, we have audiences collecting work, we have audiences appreciating art,” he says.

“By and by that’ll roll on into theatre, music and cinema and all the other bashed up versions of what art can be and cross-pollinates with.

“That’s why my work is geared towards an audience where you can laugh at it and have no idea what the fuck the work is about or why it’s even art.

“I’ve been told a number of times that none of [my] works exist well on their own, that they need to be seen as a lineage for they’re part of a longer discussion and I think that discussion’s got a fair way to go.”

Will’s art is laborious, contextual and incredibly considered and as such he described himself as a “sniper” artist.

“Rather than just going in and shooting something every day – I just wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait until something great walks past and I’m ready for it,” he says.

“I’ve got to work smart rather than run hard because I’m trying to juggle.”

French will show at Sydney’s Carriageworks later this year to mark the centenary of the 1917 strike – the largest in Australia’s history that saw more than 100,000 workers take a stand against falling wages.

“It’s good that somebody, somewhere had a sense of humour and decided that they might like to include me.”