This essay was first published in Studio Potter, Summer/ Fall 2011, vol. 36, No. 2. It's one of 25 of Barnard's essays in his recently published collection A Search for Relevance. I had not read his writing before and was touched by its unembellished power and point of view. We have a second essay and an interview as well. The book is available at Atasca Books - Richard Whittaker 


It is difficult to write about failure without addressing “success”, because it is our perception of success that informs our personal sense of failure. In other words, failure is defined by us as not obtaining success in a given endeavor. The value we place on a specific task or goal is, to a large degree, an aspect of our personality and the personality’s perception of and interaction with the world around it.  Success is a known; that is, we see its effect in our world and its impact on the people who make up our world. We are taught to strive for it because we are told our life will be better—more secure and less painful—by having it. Success appeals to us because it is quantifiable, financial wealth the main measuring stick with fame and notoriety a close second.  More importantly it is, to a great degree, a culturally agreed upon concept. Popular media and public institutions reinforce our collective concept of success everyday by spending inordinate amounts of time elevating and praising those whom they believed have achieved it. There are, of course, degrees of success and therefore, corresponding degrees of failure, but we cannot have one without the other.

Because success is a known and is often culturally specific, its’ effect on us is to make us repeat the kind of behavior that gave us that cultural approval.  As a result, we tend to avoid exploring the unknown and questioning the accepted versions of success because the results of that kind of activity are often met with skepticism by the culture we inhabit. As artists, though, success often poses more problems than failure. If we are beginning our career, we can easily become blinded by success in the form of recognition and sales, causing us, almost without realizing it, to move away from the very things that excited us about making art in the first place.  As mature artists we run the risk of allowing our successes to box us in, causing our work to become shallow and predictable copies of our past efforts.  Either way we run the danger of being trapped in the predicament to which Julia Margaret Cameron, the iconoclastic, Victorian era photographer alluded, allowing someone else to determine our worth, and then becoming angry at being undervalued.  I am not suggesting artists should measure themselves by their lack of success. What I am suggesting is that we make use of our failures to question our view of “success” to determine if it is authentic, that is to say our own. As individuals we are free to choose how we define failure and success. The question is, can failure possibly be of value and what effect does it have on us as artists. I would submit that failure, not matter how painful, is the way human beings learn.

When I first began pottery, success seemed to be defined in American ceramics as the craft of making; that is having a high level of technical skill. I struggled to make perfectly fitting lids, plates and cups which matched each other exactly and that had a perfectly applied glaze. Forms were upright, strong in appearance and perfectly symmetrical.  I found this approach to pottery onerous but struggled nevertheless to achieve that standard. It seemed to me, though, that the more technical skilled I acquired the less interesting the things I made became.  It was at this juncture that I discovered the writings of Leach and Yanagi.  It was my first glimpse into the possibility that there might to more to pottery than pure craftsmanship and that led me to Japan. 

When I first started my studies at the Kyoto University of Fine Art, I still clung to the idea that for pottery to be successful, form needed to follow function and that it had to exhibit a certain overt level of craftsmanship.  Six months of study, however, produced virtually nothing of merit.  Out of frustration, I decided to return to my comfort zone and spent one afternoon making, for my own use, the typical western style dinner plates with a flat flange lip. When I returned to school that evening to trim the prototype, I found that find the flange lip had curled up making it a shallow bowl instead of a dinner plate. I was aggravated at my inability to accomplish a task as simple as a dinner plate and even though I knew it was useless, picked up a wooden bat and tried flatten the plate. The result, inevitably, was numerous splits around the lip, but as I was about to throw it against the wall, something inside stopped me. I found the cracks compelling and without questioning why, I left it to dry and spent the next few months wondering what to do with it.  The university always rented space for the ceramics students in the last functioning woodfired noborigama in Kyoto only a few doors down from Kawaii Kanjiro’s house. I decided that I would put the plate in that firing on top of a stack of saggars leaving it exposed to the ash with another student’s pot on top of it. I hoped it would emerge looking like Bizen ware, covered with copious amounts of molten ash and a warm dark surface where the flame was denied by the pot stacked on top of it. The result, needless to say, was nothing like I envisioned, the clay was a tan-buff color without warmth, a result of the neutral firing atmosphere in that chamber, and had almost no ash deposit. My initial response, once again, was disappointment. As before I was reluctant to dismiss it and toss it on the pile of wasters.  Yagi Kazuo the head of the department was at school when we all returned with our work and I reluctantly showed him the plate. His response surprised me; he expressed interest in it and asked me to put it into the annual student exhibition at the Kyoto Museum.

That plate became a living contradiction to everything that I had believed a successful plate should have been and yet at every stage where I had failed to realize my preconceived idea of success, I had made a decision to keep it rather than discard it.  Yagi’s approval only added to the inner conflict I was experiencing, because his opinion validated my own instincts. I had to ask myself how I could find something like this plate compelling when it contradicted the formal, rational approach to functional pottery that existed in Western culture, where objects and their function were rigidly defined.  Yagi seemed to recognize the contradiction the plate posed for me. He began to explain to me that in the West function created beauty, but that in Japan, beauty created function. If the Japanese, for example, found an object that was beautiful they would create a function for it, find a way to bring it into their lives. Beauty, he said, was the primary requirement. I had long labored under the American/European constraints that surrounded pottery and had internalized them, now they suddenly ceased to be real for me. I recognized that I had to begin to trust my own feelings about what was good or bad when I confronted a piece of pottery and to try and find the source for those feelings in each and every pot that I came into contact. I had to decide for myself, based on those insights how I would define success and failure in my work. It was difficult to give up goals I had internalized, but a door had opened for me and I stepped through it. Without that failure—my inability to make a “proper” dinner plate and then to achieve a preconceived “look” from the wood firing—my world would have continued to be narrow and unsatisfying instead of exciting and full of possibilities.

It was shortly after this when I first read about Julia Margaret Cameron and her photographs. Cameron’s style—closely cropped portraits with soft, out of focus backgrounds—was not widely appreciated during her short career.  She often made her subjects sit for long periods while she exposed her plates and when the subjects would move it caused the lenses to be slightly out of focus. This practice and the resulting blurriness were an intentional and integral part of her pursuit to “arrest all the beauty that came before me”.  She was ridiculed by her contemporaries, who complained that she was an amateur who lacked even the most basic of photographic techniques—the ability to focus a camera properly.  It was Cameron’s response to her critics on this subject that resonated so strongly with me.  In 1864 she wrote to her friend Sir John Herschel, noted mathematician and amateur photographer; “What is focus and who has the right to say what focus is the legitimate focus?”  Unlike her colleagues, Cameron was not trying to please the public by showing how adept she was with new technology or how real and life like her photographs were—the popular notion of a successful photographer at the time. She was, instead, trying to capture beauty, an image that only she could create. She was an artist and as an artist laid claim to the right to determine for herself in her own work what was successful.  I came to the realization that if a genre which we often regard as common and generally without artistic merit—photographic portraiture—is capable of the kind of feeling that Cameron was able to deliver in her work, then I, certainly should be able to create that same kind of personal expression within the context of functional pottery.

We often hear the mantra that an artist needs to take risks. This has manifested itself in contemporary practice to mean that an artist must contrive some new image or technique, or manipulate a material in a way that runs counter to our conventional understanding of it, all in the hope that the resulting work appears unlike anything we have, heretofore, ever seen or imagined.  This kind of risk taking, however, is as rigid and as codified as my early vision of creating sets of perfectly matching plates, cups and bowls, precisely because it has become the new standard of success.  I would argue, though, that taking risks is about the willingness to fail, not merely in the eyes of the art world or the public, but in our own eyes.  Failure, then, becomes nothing more than the tool we use to sharpen and develop our own personal vision and to explore the unknown.   
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1  Julia Margaret Cameron, Annals of My Glass House, 1889
2  Julia Margaret Cameron, letter to Sir John Herschel, 31 December 1864, Heinz Archives