Artchain day 3 (I’m still doing it, just not consecutively 😉 ) I was nominated to post an item of artwork a day for 5 days, and to nominate others…
I’m choosing my “Snow Queen” headdress, because I think it illustrates something important about the creative process: You have to be willing to experiment, take risks and make mistakes.
This piece began as a mask, around 2004. I was going for a “north wind” theme, but the overall shape wasn’t right so I chucked it in the reject pile. Once a year or so, I’d pull it back out and fiddle with it some more. No matter what I tried, it just didn’t fit nicely. It also looked more like an octopus than a cloud spirit, so it kept going back to the reject pile.
In 2012, I decided to give it one more shot. When I realized that there was no way this thing was going to become a cloud, I decided to hack it in half, and turn the top half into a headpiece (the other half is still with me, waiting to become a crown). This piece has been very popular, and I’m often asked to recreate it, or to riff off of the original design… but it’s worth noting that it started out as a “mistake” that I rescued from the reject pile.
