✹ The Failure

This week we talked about ‘Failure’ 
What failure means to each of us?
What quality makes particular work a failure?

Failure
(n.) lack of success
(n.) the omission of expected or required action
(n.) the action or state of not functioning

For me the word ‘failure’ might be a bit too strong for my own project.
As I always thing every mistake is lesson.

Regarding my own work, If I have to choose one to talk in this contex - I think about ⇲Plastic garland(2018) , jewelry art piece made from rubber coat and acrylic sheet.

Regarding my own work - this piece is not a complete failure for me. What I found after finished this project was - I don’t like the outcome. So that probably is the closest feeling of failure in my opinion.

        The inspiration of this project is drawn from plastic garland. I happened to see it everywhere on the spirit house. People use them to worship the place where they live in - houses, working places, school, public building - everywhere.
        At first, I attracted to their colour, their bright vivid colours, that’s what made me interested in this object. Also, the context of religion, belief and spiritual in materialism world are the subjects I always passionate about. Once I started working on research, material and form experiment - I sort of lose that sense of colour I attracted to during the process. Because the form of the necklace looks so similar to the original inspiration - I feel like it’s too direct to use the same colour as well so I decided to change the tone of colour instead of adjusting form or else.

The final outcome, for me, I feel like the idea hasn’t settled yet.
The component, material and technique are all good. But colour, form and composition should be further developed.

So in my opinion, failure might be some sort of feeling of the owner that doesn’t like their own work. Yet, I take this as an opportunity to reflect on my mistake and can develop in the next project.

For other artist’s work, here I have an example in flamingo stone carved from Cartier.

Cartier, one of Fabergé’s competitor, tried to make stone carved flamingo inspired from Fabergé’s work. Turn out the replicated one from catier has distorted proportion of the neck and body, The length of its legs also unnatural. Moreover, unlike Fabergé’s work, Cartier flamingo can not stand by its own, attachment to the base is needed. 

I feel like Cartier should be able to develop their work by studying Fabergé’s. Replication is not wrong but should be better at some point. For this one I think Cartier might want to make the model stand with one leg by their own but somehow their proportion and composition might make it hardly to be so. 

𓆹𓆹𓆹
In this session what I’ve learned is that failure can be seen in different context - material choice, intention, time, place, skill, purpose ,communication ,etc

To identify what failure means to myself, it reminds me to think about the possibility to make and fail without fear. Because if we can address what make the particular work fail - we can, then, develop or solve it in the next try rather than give it up completely.