There are things I do in my work that I’m not always aware of immediately. There are things I try to do…ideas I hold close while working on a piece, hoping that it seeps in, just a little bit. The combination of this intention and surprise is where I like it to end best. Having every aspect of a series or a piece planned out isn’t as interesting to me as the continued discovery is.
What I’m working on now is the idea of failure. I’ve had some royal screw ups in my life, and despite it all I try to move forward a better person. I dissect my missteps, look hard at my bad decisions and wrestle every lesson I can out of each one of my failures. This causes transformation…emotional alchemy…makes something beautiful out of something that is not.
This is what I’m looking for. The idea that each failure, while it’s still there in the past, changes me for the better. I’ve decided to show this through a series of dead bird sculptures. Dead birds have been part of my work for a long time, as I’ve always loved recording the beauty that I saw despite it feeling sad. This recording causes it to live on…isn’t art just trying to give permanence to a feeling? An idea?
Each day, every day I’m choosing a bird to sculpt that represents this transformation from a failure to a lesson. Each piece in this series “All my failures (Aren’t they lovely?)” will be a one of a kind piece, which isn’t typical for me. Traditionally I make molds and cast, allowing for an edition of each piece, or multiples. However the idea that each of these failures happened once and was moved on from after the lesson was learned is important here, so each piece will be unique.
