Failure is everywhere in the news right now. People are pointing fingers, casting blame, using the word like a verdict.

Which has found me thinking about failure. Not the headline-making kind. The quieter, more personal kind. The moment when a work doesn’t land. When the idea in your head and the thing in your hands don’t match. When the silence after the attempt is louder than expected.

In art, failure isn’t just common—it’s required. It’s how artists test the limits of what’s possible. It’s how painters, sculptors, dancers, and musicians stretch, surprise, stumble, and start again. Most of the artists I admire make failure part of their practice. They understand that it’s part of the material. Sometimes it even becomes the material.

I’m starting to wonder if “failure” is even the right word.

Maybe we need a new one. Or, maybe we imbue failure with something less judgmental. Something more curious. Something like: a lesson, a step towards clarity, an experiment, a mirror we didn’t know we needed to look into, an invitation to be honest with our work and ourselves.

And what if we got better at being in relationship with failure? At listening to it instead of labeling it? At writing about it, sharing it, sitting with it—not as a shortcoming, but as a welcome and respected teacher?

Here are a few ways we could, together, engage with ‘whatever we want to call failure’!
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• Journaling about a time something didn’t work—and what you learned.
• Making something bad on purpose, just to free your mind.
• Talking with a friend about a recent misstep—without trying to fix it.
• Revisiting a work you abandoned. Maybe it just needed time.
• Thanking your failures. They’ve brought you here.

We don’t need to glorify failure. But we can un-shame it. And we can definitely stop letting it keep us from making the next thing. Because every time we try again, we’re proving that the creative process isn’t about perfection. It’s about presence. And courage. And care.

And that’s where the real art lives.

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