31.08.26
On the rare occasion that I decide to be sociable, rather than staring into the abyss, I attended an event featuring a platter of Dundee’s creative scene. I expected some familiar faces, some that I only knew via Instagram and many of the unknown. Despite being a short heighted and sighted millennial who doesn’t mind calling someone on the phone, meeting in unfamiliar situations requires preparation. In a vacuous attempt to be witty with a heavy-handed dollop of self-deprecation, I sought an opening gambit upon answering the friendly question of what have you been up to?
You know. Submissions and rejections.
Such wit almost certainly went down as well as the surprise bestselling album Farts in Churches: Greatest Hits which can be found in good car boot sales.
Over time, my interest in the notion of failure has increased. It’s not so different from making small talk with the person you share the morning commute with after several years. Growing up, my outlook on failure was bleak as I was rather an emotional child. Picture Harry Potter, who cries every weekday not because he sleeps under the stairs but because of mental math. As I matured, I learned that if something was done wrong, I took the feedback head on and made it right – despite what my middling exam results claimed.
However, the creative world holds a certain standard called subjectivity, that can often be make or break. The days of guaranteeing a spot on the fridge are long gone and you’re no longer the cute thing drawing pictures of Sonic the Hedgehog. You’re an adult trying to flog concepts to a selection committee with diminishing returns and non-existent feedback.
I will need to throw out a cliche, and I apologise, but I’ve never claimed to be that creative.
There may be grounds to the notion that all creatives dislike their earlier work. My relationship with past works is fractured. Not everything is terrible, but I wouldn’t make around 90% of it today. This is linked to the internal feedback loop of the self. You can’t help but look at yourself and potentially cringe at all the questionable choices made. We are all victims to the oncoming glacier of hindsight. My growing disdain for earlier works all come with experience. I believe the majority could either have been done better with a more polished eye or should have been buried in the depths of a burning wheelie bin on Bonfire Night.
Failure doesn’t have to come from a selection committee or an algorithm which refuses to get you more than a dozen likes; it can come from the confines of your own home.
For me, an idea which I had been batting around for nearly ten years reached a breaking point. I won’t go into the themes of what I attempted to create as I’ll be accused of trying to pitch a backdoor proposal via a blog post. Let’s just say, it was going to be a medium dog sized sculpture.
The attempt to make this dog was housed in the realm of a previous homeowner’s shed. The room left in this shed after filling it with various garden equipment, boxes of tools and children’s bikes may as well have been a kennel for this dog. The lack of space, light and dryness took its toll as I clumsily built the canine, ruining a perfectly good garden table in the process. I kept on telling myself that it would look good in the end. As we reached two stops from the end, I got off the bus. The dog was sent to live on a farm.
It may seem like a bogeyman or an eldritch horror of your choosing, but fortunately failure is a necessary evil to learn who you are as a creative. From my shed debacle, the subject of creative space and what it enabled lingered on but it is never that simple.
Shared spaces or studios depending on how you wish to flower it, become gold dust, especially in a city with a thriving creative community. However, the economics to obtain and maintain space increases year over year, particularly with funding opportunities becoming less of a given. Speaking as a visual artist, there is nothing freer than to make and not worry about the mess.
The mess allows experimentation.
The experiments breed mistakes.
The mistakes eventually become happy mistakes and so on and so forth.
In a perfect world, I would embrace unlimited access to a financially-friendly space which meets my personal needs. The potential to make it my own fail-safe is grand and yet it’s not a necessity. Any blank page can be daunting and the battle within my shed only led to one winner:
The shed.
Crushed by its green mass and with some girl from Kansas stealing my boots, I did however gain a consolation prize. The limitations and failures drove me to embrace a space-friendly output with 2D work and a laptop from the comfort of a dining table. The quest for creative freedom may lead to despair but it can also lead to an opening.
The failures of making made me appreciate other working processes which I had blinders to. The dog is now more appealing as a drawing rather than a sculpture. Elements from the 90% can be cherry picked into fresher ideas. Embracing the limitations of a creative space opened doors which I would not have ventured into without those failures.
Today I love and appreciate someone else’s contributions for the fridge. And while flogging concepts to committees or grappling with mistakes is still the nature of the beast, the rejections and failures ultimately don’t matter. The stops you get off at might not be what you planned but the buses will always be running.
Sean Wheelan (He/Him) is a Dundee-based artist. He incorporates absurdist language and imagery into his works which range from text, videos to paper cut-outs. He uses pop culture references as means to explore the topics of identity and the notion of a cultural exile. @seanwheelanart
If you would like to support us in creating even better content, please consider joining or supporting our Amps Community.
