Exercise 2: Failures – Reflective Narrative on Artistic Process
In this assignment, the theme of failure is not interpreted as a negative outcome, but as a necessary and transformative stage within creative practice. The brief encourages exploration into moments where ideas didn’t land, outcomes deviated from intention, or results emerged from uncertainty, struggle, and unexpected turns. What may first appear as an error or breakdown often carries deep generative potential. Through this exercise, I have reflected on how various emotional, artistic, and logistical “failures” within my creative process led to the development of deeply personal poetic works and visual storytelling. These pieces, ranging from myth-inspired poetry to illustrated narratives, became cathartic expressions of identity, exile, and rediscovery. What follows is not just a discussion of missteps, but a record of how being lost in the process ultimately led me to a more truthful place than any plan could have offered.
During the development of my work, I encountered several personal and artistic failures: some technical, some emotional, and others existential in nature. At times, I felt adrift, unable to shape my ideas into a straightforward narrative. At other times, I found that the clarity of my vision was clouded by the very personal nature of my source material. In fact, it was in the moments of greatest emotional disorientation that the most profound creative revelations occurred. The writing of poems such as “The Penelope (in Me)”, “Aeolus and Nausicaä”, and “The Rare Seashell” emerged not from certainty, but from emotional necessity. Each poem became a way of navigating through uncertainty and emotional transition, especially at a time in my life when I was making difficult personal and professional decisions.
One of the central challenges I faced was how to visualise abstract emotional states: grief, longing, confusion, and transformation, into something tangible. I experimented with AI-assisted image generation to accompany the poetry, but quickly realised that the tool was only as clear as my own vision. The AI required narrative prompts that reflected the ethos (or the stylistic and emotional spirit) of the piece. This process in itself became a kind of failure: the failure to delegate meaning-making to a machine. I had to learn that AI could help render my ideas, but it could not find them for me. The struggle to “speak the right language” to the AI actually forced me to understand my own work better. It was through this failure of translation between tool and intention that my voice grew stronger.
For example, the poem “The Penelope (in Me)” was born from a moment of emotional confusion: a realisation that my longing for someone else was, in truth, a longing to find a part of myself. Initially, the accompanying illustrations were too dark, too literal, and emotionally detached. It took several failed attempts: images that didn’t match the tone or looked visually incorrect, before I was able to create a mythic and tender narrative across six visual panels. These images came to embody the emotional arc of the poem: from being lost at sea, to encountering inner conflict (the “suitors” as intrusive thoughts), to finally coming home to oneself. Failure in matching image to text pushed me to redefine what I wanted to express: not an epic about external events, but a quiet odyssey of personal return.
The poem “Aeolus and Nausicaä” also carries this complexity. Aeolus, the figure from the Homeric myth, became in my life a symbol of disruption and breath, of change and chaos. Nausicaä, the healing figure, represented the presence of someone who recognises your pain without trying to fix it. My inspiration was Odyssey all the way along. These mythological characters were influenced by real individuals I met during my time abroad, yet writing them as archetypes gave me the emotional distance to process those encounters. In this case, “failure” was emotional in nature: I was caught between hope and uncertainty. The poem was a way to hold both truths at once. Its creation was also a way to name the silence left by someone who once brought meaning but offered no clear closure.
“The Rare Seashell” added yet another layer to this journey. It was inspired by a line from Greek poet Nikos Kavvadias, who wrote of giving up all he loved for “a hard-to-find, small seashell.” That image struck a deep chord. The poem became a metaphor for those brief, luminous encounters that change you, even if you cannot hold on to them. It became a meditation on acceptance, on letting go of something beautiful rather than damaging it by trying to possess it. Failure here took the form of surrender: not getting what one hoped for, but gaining something quieter and deeper in return.
Separate from the written poetry, I created a visual story titled “The Bird Who Came From Afar,” which was later adapted into a short video with music and narrative pacing. This project was, in many ways, the most technically challenging of all. It required me to sift through a wide selection of captured images, arrange them in a meaningful sequence, and synchronise them with audio and rhythm. The failure in this project was always “just around the corner” whether in the inability to find the right order, or the frustration of choosing the right emotional tone for the music. I eventually found the perfect atmosphere in a piano version of “November Rain” by Guns N’ Roses. The music, stripped of lyrics, carried the precise emotional weight I wanted: longing, melancholy, and quiet power. Arranging the frames into a coherent emotional arc involved several iterations. What initially seemed like a failure of cohesion slowly began to transform into something intimate and genuine. This project, like the others, did not appear fully formed: it emerged through missteps, frustration, and constant reworking.
This reflection is a testament to the value of getting lost. Artistic failure is not just about flawed outcomes: it’s about holding space for questions that don’t yet have answers. The visual pieces, poetic texts, and introspective commentaries I’ve created over the past weeks all stem from the cracks in my own understanding. From emotional uncertainty, from misread messages, from loss and rediscovery. And yet it is in those cracks that something real took root.
If success in art is about precision, then failure is about depth. I learned that what doesn’t work immediately might simply be leading you to a deeper version of your work: one you hadn’t yet imagined.
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