Rejects

Osteomancy -The Bones Speak (detail) 2023 -(application reject)

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” ~ Scott Adams

This week I’ve been sorting out artworks for several exhibitions. The first is an application for an exhibition, the other for a confirmed exhibition in a year’s time.

As I wrote the exhibition application, I realised that I needed to carefully select the works I had made to fit the exhibition brief. Even though I had created four artworks on the exhibition theme, the first one I did was not as good as the triptych I created afterwards.

It’s a bit of a wrench to let go of the works you know you have laboured over. Yet I look at these works as ones that were needed to be made in order to start off the creative flow. The triptych that I created after that first artwork Osteomancy (pictured above) is far more resolved. These three pieces have an elegance that is missing in this first artwork.

I used the same selection process for my confirmed exhibition Ice Stories: Dispatches from the Arctic which will be held in February 2024. Two of the framed artworks no longer looked as resolved when put next to the other artworks. I wanted to have a floor plan that allowed plenty of space around each artwork, so they could ‘breathe’.

This meant two artworks had to get the chop. Maybe I will take them out of their frames and reuse the frames later, but I know intuitively that if I was to include them, it would lessen the impact of the other works.

Painful as it may be, we have to ‘kill our darlings’, those artworks that we spend so long with, they no longer have a freshness about them. The ones that mean something to us emotionally but don’t necessarily have enough quality to stand out by themselves. 

They were pilots to lead us into our subsequent works and as such deserve to be acknowledged and then let go. I could even cut them up into small pieces and rework them anew. Who knows. Collage allows me to do that without feeling ‘guilty’ that I have wasted my time, materials and effort.

There are always going to trials to get you to where you want to go with your next body of work. These rejects are not failures, they are learnings. Think of them as templates or pilots; pointers in the direction you want to take. Without them, the wonderful artworks that follow would never get made.

On (thin) Sea Ice 2022 (exhibition reject)