A couple months ago, my husband James and I were packing the car and preparing to drive home after a visit to my mother's house. Just before we got ready to leave, brought several cardboard boxes out to the car. "I think you forgot this the last time we went through the attic, so I brought them down", she said, "Thought you might want them." I hadn't a clue what was in the boxes, but I took them and packed them in the car.
At home, my James and my sister-in-law Mary went through the boxes. We soon discovered that these were boxes of some of my old work I did when I was just dabbling into making jewelry. Back then, I had worked in a craft store and I pretty much made jewelry out of anything I laid my hands out, painted wooden beads, Friendly plastic, FIMO, you name it, I probably made something out of it. Some of it turned out nice, some of it didn't. These were the boxes that didn't...which explained what they were still moldering in my mother's attic 10 years later.
Mary, who like her brother James, is a person that doesn't mince words. "Hey Nikki, I know you're talented and all, but some of these things are really ugly."
I had thought the same thing when I opened up the box, but it's one thing to think it and another to hear someone else say it. I felt pretty sheepish, "Yeah I know...but it was a long time ago."
"I mean it's not all ugly," she continued, twisting the knife in further, "This is kinda cool." She held up brown, lumpy Fimo decorated string tie, "But I mean...what's this?"
After that, I pretty much decided that I was going to toss all of the boxes. Why have such ugliness around the house? Later that day I was talking to my friend Dawn about my mom's unlovely find and told her my intentions of tossing my little boxes of horrors.
"You mean you're not going to keep any of it?" she asked.
"No way! I get ill just looking at that stuff," I said. "I mean, I'm embarrassed to say I even made that stuff."
Dawn, who's the type of person who can spin anything into a positive said, "Well, I know you think it's ugly, but look how far you've come since then. It would be a shame to not have some reminder of where you started from."
She was right of course. And the truth of her statement was enough to make me stop my whining. The real problem was that I was just embarrassed for people to see my mistakes. It was embarrassing to see that you can make something that was really ugly, think that was neat looking at the time, only to dig it up several years later to see how ugly it truly was.
In college, the art instructor that I remember most was a short and spare Indian woman who taught classes in drawing, collage and assemblage, and fiber design. She had a very straightforward, no-nonsense demeanor and such an intense gaze that James who was then my fiancé, had nicknamed her "The Eye". She wasn't the type to hand out compliments freely. She was very critical. Very blunt. Very brilliant. More than once I came home from her classes in tears. And she was one of the best art teachers I ever had...I learned a lot from her.
One of the many things "The Eye" had always stressed was the importance of artists documenting their work. "Document!" she would admonish us in her thick Indian accent, "Document your finished work! Document your unfinished work! But most especially document your mistakes! From your failures comes your greatest success! Take photographs, make drawings, take notes...anything you can to catalogue your work! If you do not document, then you do not have a roadmap for your future work! If you do not document, your work does not exist!"
And document we did. She would not award full points to any piece that didn't have some sort of documentation discussing the process. And considering how critical she could be, those documentation points would sometimes be all that you had to keep you from failing completely. I documented first in defense of my G.P.A., then out of habit, and then when I went into business, out of usefulness. Every earring I make, every design I develop is scanned or photographed. Each image is accompanied with information about materials and process. If you bought something from me three years ago, you can show it to me and I can tell you when I made it, what it's made from, and where I sold it at. After talking to Dawn I realized that although this was true with my post collage work and the work I have for sale, I had nothing documenting what I did before then. And here I was about to destroy the evidence.
So I'm going to go back through those boxes. Yes, it may be ugly. Yes, I will come across something that will make me think, "What the hell was I thinking?". But maybe along the way I can find bits of that roadmap that led me to where I am today. And when I do, I'm going to document, document, document.
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