I moved studios last month and finally faced the flat file I've been dragging around since 2014. Two full drawers are just bad editions. Not aborted, not developmental, just bad. Misregistered, muddy, or I simply didn't believe the image when I pulled it and it shows.

I almost threw them out. Then I spent an hour pulling each one and trying to remember what I was thinking, and a strange thing happened: the bad ones are the most honest record of the work. The good prints are what I wanted to make. The bad ones are what I actually made while I was still figuring out what I wanted. They have more of me in them than the ones I'd frame.

I kept maybe forty, gave the rest to the recycling. Now I'm wondering if I should build them into something. An edition of the failures. There's something in that idea that won't let go, about how printmaking is the medium that's supposed to launder the mistake out, and yet the mistakes are where the thinking happened.