How to fail successfully in Art…

​Imagine spending hours of your time designing, researching and sculpting a beautifully intricate mask, for it to crack, fall apart and crumble at the last moment! Disappointment, frustration and a little bit of sadness will surely fill your creative heart. How wonderful that our Year 9 students had the opportunity to experience these things! It certainly wasn’t our intention to produce masks that didn’t quite make it out of the kiln in one piece, but when these things happen they provide huge amounts of learning and invaluable experience. Whilst we continuously strive to build the confidence and esteem of our young artists, it is arguably just as important that they experience failures and disappointments. Without such experiences, students will never take risks for fear of failing. So rather than dwelling on the fact that the clay dried too quickly or the bags weren’t air tight or that porcelain shrinks too much on a mould… we will instead value the processes that we practiced, reflect on how we could do it better next time and above all realise failure is very much part of our success. And of course as Artists, we’re able to adapt the concept of our work in response to unforeseen circumstances…
“Our beautifully distressed and fragile masks were inspired by cultures other than our own, therefore the broken pieces are representative of the ignorance and discrimination that we’re destroying through gained knowledge and the appreciation of others’ heritage.”
Well done Year 9, we failed extremely well!