Failure is intrinsic to the human experience. It is painful and haunting and comes laced with shame, anger, despair, guilt, inadequacy and frustration – emotions we usually wish away or hide (O'Gorman and Werry 2012). In modern Britain we are told that failure is bad. It is to be avoided in order to preserve one's dignity. Yet at the same time, failure is to be confronted and overcome. A slew of self-help books enjoin us to rediscover our self-esteem by getting over the fear of failure that holds us back in achieving our goals. Here mistakes become opportunities or revelations; in the somewhat ironic words of the playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett, ‘Fail again. Fail better’ (Beckett 1983). Failure is thus reclaimed as a self-improving experience from which we learn and become more resilient.

Failure is also a persistent threat within the creative process. The creation story of the Maya told within the Popol Vuh, or Book of the People, illustrates the universality of the close link between creativity and failure. It recounts the four attempts of the gods to create living beings. At first they made animals, but these could not speak and therefore could not worship the gods. So the gods then made men of mud, but these were too crumbly, lopsided and lacked knowledge. The gods realised that they were a mistake and let them dissolve away in water. Then they made men from wood. These looked like men and could procreate but lacked hearts and minds and could not understand. Again, they were unsatisfactory, so eventually the gods destroyed them. Finally they made men from maize dough. These men talked, had minds, were good and handsome, and finally the gods were satisfied (Goetz and Morley 1950). In this parable of persistence, the new comes about through a process of learning and experimentation with materials and form.