Success (and some failures)

Empty paracetamol blister packs and the flattened out hospital pain medication cups

Some things work, some things don’t. Adaption to (perceived) failure is key. As a printmaker, everything you are taught is about getting crisp lines, strong blacks or in cyanotype prints, strong blues and pristine whites. Oh how all those expectations set you up for failure.

I’m not a totally clean-cut type of person. I like order and structure, tidy desks and everything put away in its place. However, the edges around all my working and living spaces (studio, kitchen, bedroom) are all cluttered with things I haven’t found places for but need to keep handy. It’s a contradiction that I have had to learn to live with.

Imperfection is never my goal and yet it occurs regularly in my arts practice. I have big ideas which never quite come out the way they are planned. The cyanotype print artist book I am currently working on is a typical example.  

I made a dozen small square prints of paracetamol blister packs which I was quite happy with. Then I had a printing session where everything seemed to not work. The whites were ‘muddy’ and the images didn’t really thrill me. It felt like a wasted morning going back and forth outside to print in the sun, then back inside to wash out the solution and hope the printing went OK.

The test print I made on one of the papers I had cut for the artist book was too thin to use for a folded book which meant I would need stronger paper that could be folded to hold the cyanotype print squares. I had to change all my plans.

I had just six A4 size papers left over from another project which were the right thickness. This had me thinking about how six pages could tell my post operative story. I realised everything connected to the knee surgery in hospital was about those first six weeks. This gave me a new structure where each of the six pages repesented one week.

I brought out the hospital mementos to make prints with; the hospital wrist band (too opaque  it didn’t work), the luggage tag attached to my belongings (too boring) and the tiny paper cups that were used to hold the pain relief tablets the hospital dispensed.

I flattened them out and made some prints with them. Success! I liked their strange shapes. I revisited my sketchbook and thought about the ‘tendrils of pain’ I had written about. I tried some fibres on the prints which looked sort of OK but didn’t really grab me. Yet two of the prints I had originally thought of as failures seemed to hold interesting possibilities.

Where I perceived ‘muddy’ whites as imperfect, there was something about the blurring of the edges that reflected how I live my life. How pain dulls the ‘edginess’ of creativity, how it forces you to take a step back and let life flow around you in all its messiness.

I’m going to stitch the squares together with red thread to make them double-sided. They can be pulled out of the pockets, two of these ‘mini stories’ for each of the six week pages. There will undoubtedly be some more failures along this creative journey. The challenge will be how to reframe them into success stories.

These cyanotype prints aren’t perfect. They’re a bit blurry yet interesting.