Your portfolio has a special code you can use to automatically list how many artifacts it contains. You can use this, for example, on the front page of your portfolio, or within any post, page, or widget.
Just put 0 artifacts into your editor, and when your content is viewed, this will be replaced by the actual count, for example if your portfoloo contains 12 items, this code will be replaced by:
12 artifacts
Changing that code to: 0 artifacts will display the same text, but it will be a hyperlinked to the main portfolio index.