For future readers and yourself, the solution I found to this was to use the filter block to obtain a reference to the artifact you need. For example, in my case I needed a reference to the first artifact in a container, so I made the first artifact always have the label 'main'. Then with a filter node, I do a condition for artifact:*.label == main. Then, in any downstream blocks, you can reference the output of the filter block (which in my case will be any artifact with the label main).
... View more