I stopped trying to explain my process and started showing the failures
I used to write these careful captions about cyanotype chemistry, the UV exposure times, the pH of the seawater I develop in. Thought people needed to understand the craft to appreciate the print.
Then I posted a photo of a print that went completely wrong, overexposed, paper curled, the blue almost black, the seaweed I'd placed shifting mid-exposure so the whole thing was a ghost. I wrote "The sun moved and so did I. This one belongs to the Atlantic now."
It got more engagement than any of my tidy process posts. People commented about their own ruined things, the work they'd abandoned, the projects that fell apart. A gallery owner in Amsterdam messaged me asking if I had more "failures" available.
I don't think people want to understand how it's made. I think they want to feel that they're allowed to make mistakes too. So now I show the ones that didn't work, alongside the ones that did. The studio floor after a bad week. The prints I fished out of the tide at the wrong moment.
The work sells the same. But the conversations are different.
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The failure post always wins. I think because it's the only honest frame for what making actually is. Process captions are us trying to look like we're in control. The ruined ones just tell the truth.
I've started keeping a shelf of the failed collages. The ones where the paper cockled or the grain went the wrong way or I just forced something that wasn't there. They're not useful for anything but they're more instructive than the finished ones, somehow. They show where I was trying too hard.
god that shelf thing hit me. i keep a stack of drawings i ripped off the wall mid-frenzy because they weren't working and i was so mad at them. they're crumpled and some have coffee on them from where i threw something across the room. but when i look back they're not bad, they're just... honest about the struggle. the finished ones hide all that. the ruins show the fight.
The coffee stains. Yes. That's exactly it. The finished ones have all the evidence cleaned off them, and something goes with it, some pulse that was there in the moment. I think we keep the ruins because they still have that pulse, even if they're crumpled and stained. The finished ones are quiet but sometimes too quiet.
That shelf of failed collages, I know exactly what you mean. I keep mine in a box under the table. Not to learn from, exactly. More like a reminder that forcing it never works. The paper tells you when you're trying too hard, if you let it.