This project began with a collection I never intended to make.
Over years of applying for jobs, grants, exhibitions, academic positions and other opportunities, I accumulated rejection letters. Individually, they disappeared quickly into inboxes. Together, they became an archive of ambition, labour, judgement and persistence.
The project asks what happens when rejection is no longer treated as something private or shameful, but as material proof of intent, as a life diary and as a starting point.
This website is an online archive containing my own rejection letters alongside those submitted by others. The letters are catalogued and translated into data using AI analysis: patterns emerge around language, institutions, frequency and repetition. This deliberately mirrors the systems that evaluate us. Applications are ranked, scored and selected. Here, the same logic is turned toward failure.
The project is partly autoethnographic. I use my own experiences not because they are exceptional, but because they are ordinary. Rejection in creative work can often quickly turn from this proposal was rejected into feeling like I was rejected. For artists, failure is constant but invisible; no one wants to share their failed attempts, why would they? Careers are usually narrated through acceptances: exhibitions, funding, prizes, residencies. The much larger archive of unanswered emails, failed applications and abandoned possibilities disappears.
By inviting others to contribute their own letters, the project moves from autobiography toward collective evidence. The archive then leaves the screen through wearable works, objects and video performance. Rejection can be printed, embroidered, carried and worn. I am interested in wearing failure as a second skin: taking language that once judged me and turning it into something I can edit, display and control.
I do not want to romanticise failure. Rejection can be arbitrary, exhausting and materially consequential. But I am interested in changing the narrative around it, especially for myself and my artistic career. This project is also my first contemporary art project. Material that could be read as evidence that I did not belong somewhere becomes the material through which I begin constructing a new artistic identity.
What becomes possible when failure is no longer understood as the opposite of success, but as one of the materials from which a life and an artistic practice are made?