Epic Fail

We talked about what failure means to us as artists and designers today and what can we do with failures in our practice?

I often struggle with failures in my own practice, because I set the bar very hight for myself, most of the time, I can not meet the goal that I set up for myself, so I always felt very disappointed by the results. Failure is when expectation does not match what was being observed. I realized that how things turn out will never be completely under your control. I, as an artist and designer will have to embrace that idea and live with it. My own struggle comes from the fact that I always want things to be under my control and I will get very upset when things does not go the way that I wanted. I have to constantly fight this tendency to employee a linear plan-execution approach in my practice. It is not easy.

Reflecting on myself as a perfectionist, I find myself have a very narrowly defined aesthetics. I like pretty things, for example, things with elegant form and made perfectly with great craftsmanship. I had a hard time to find beauty in ugly things or what I consider poorly made things. That mentality prevented me from allowing myself producing anything that I would consider ugly in my creative process. I am alway very careful and calculated with every decision that I make.

I found this idea of intentionally creating a failure quite liberating. How can I create a perfect failure? Setting the bar low to start with take a lot of pressure off my shoulder. I know what I am gonna make is going to be terrible, but I don’t care because that was the goal. Having this mentality is so liberating and it allowed me to loosen up in my creative process.

We had the all afternoon to turn one of our past work into a failure. I put some of my bioplastic samples in the water and microwaved them. One of the sample completely dissolved and the other one softened so I can reshape it. One was a complete failure but the other one turned out to be a success piece of information that I could potentially use for future works.