Born of Failure (2013)

Resin, vintage Inbox, 9 1/2" x 7" x 14"

The life of a creative person involves a lot of rejection, which often comes in the form of a self addressed stamped envelope containing a letter from an editor or an organization saying Thanks, kid, but no thanks.

I have spent many nights pondering success and failure. Is a piece of writing or a work of art only a success if the right person says it is? Only if it is published by the right people or shown in the right gallery? Is it possible to find a measure of success in simply having made something meaningful, in having put a piece of yourself out into the world?

Around the time I finished writing my first book, I read a quote by Winston Churchill that said, “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another without loss of enthusiasm.” I wondered what I could do to buoy myself in the face of all of the rejection letters that were bound to come in from agents and publishers.

That’s how this sculpture came to be. Each time I received a rejection, I cast an envelope in resin with Churchill’s quote brailled on the front. It was my way of making each rejection into something beautiful, something tactile and tangible, to create a success born of failure.