Drawing Towards Significant Change
These images are my photographic sketches. I think of many of these works are failures. But important failures. Works that I needed to get somewhere else or are my best attempt thus far at getting somewhere that I want to go, and so I cherish them.
Failure is a rarely celebrated part of progress and innovation in the arts and the sciences (as well as everything in between). With an artistic practice where each image I make is often radically different than the previous work, failure is especially inevitable and also especially generative. So here I am, celebrating my failures and my jokes, and putting them up here for you to puzzle over, laugh at or reflect on.
I certainly think of my failed images more often than I think of the successes. They’re like itches that I can’t help scratching: what is it that I liked about this idea and where did I go wrong? Is the problem technical or conceptual? Or just that I didn’t do enough, and I somehow feel guilty about that? So I will keep plugging away at the idea until I’m satisfied.
In the sciences, where things are a bit more regimented than here in the arts, they have a whole process to deal with their moments of inspiration. Question. Research. Hypothesis. Experimentation. Analysis. Publish. However, when the hypothesis doesn’t work, we rarely hear about it. Such failures just don’t get published in the limited space of scientific journals.
I often think about all the redundant Master’s theses have been completed because of this limited room to value and share these failures. Knowing why and how we fail is central to innovation, and so this is why I’ve put these up for anyone to see. Maybe you’ve failed in the same way I’ve failed. Or maybe you can succeed where I’ve failed. I hope so.