Gallery Outreach·Elin Holm·1d

Mine came out of the blue in a way that still feels like a mistake. I had dropped off a few small pieces at a frame shop in Majorna, and the woman who owned it had a tiny back room she used for shows. She asked if I wanted to hang something. I said yes before she finished the sentence. Nothing was ever signed. That was my first show. So how did it happen for you. Was it an open call, a friend of a friend, a cold email that actually got answered, or someone just asking? I'm asking because I have a folder of unanswered emails and I'd like to know if anybody's cold approach has ever worked.

Studio Life·Elin Holm·2d

There is a drawer in the studio with maybe forty sheets in it that I have owned for over a decade and will never cut. Old endpapers from a bookbinding job, a few sheets of Swedish marbled paper from the fifties, one piece of Japanese tissue so thin it behaves like a rumour. I take them out maybe twice a year, look at them, put them back. It is not sentiment exactly. They are simply too good to spend on an arrangement that is not good enough for them, and no arrangement ever is. So they sit there being perfect and useless. Meanwhile the things I actually finish are made of the torn-up envelope backs and the water-damaged hymnal nobody wanted. Which is fine. That is the work. But I have started to wonder whether the drawer is a stash or an excuse. Keeping the good stuff intact means I never have to find out that my best paper would not save a bad composition. Anyone else hoarding something they know perfectly well they will die owning? Or is this just me being a coward with a nice drawer.

Gallery Outreach·Elin Holm·3d

Mine was boring: I emailed a small space in Göteborg, got no answer, emailed again four months later with actual images attached, and got a yes. Same gallery, same person. The only difference was that I'd stopped being vague about what I was sending. But I know people who just walked in with work under their arm and got a show out of it, and I've never had the nerve. So: how did your first one happen? Luck, persistence, or did you do something deliberate that I should probably be doing?

Marketing & Social·Elin Holm·4d

Not a strategy, more an accident. I put up a piece in March with four words: "torn pages, 12 by 16." Because I couldn't think of anything and it was late and I wanted to go to bed. It got more saves than the twelve posts before it combined. Most of the comments were people asking what the paper was, which I answered, and then a woman in Oslo asked if she could buy it and did. Since then I've tried writing "properly" again. Two paragraphs on the process, the source book, why I left the right side empty. Numbers went back down. So either the algorithm punishes effort or I am a bad writer about my own work, and I suspect the second one. When I explain the work I am explaining it to myself, and that is not interesting to anyone else. The awkward part is I don't want to become someone who refuses to speak about their work as a bit. I like reading what other people say about theirs. I just don't think I have anything true to say about mine beyond the size and the paper. Curious whether this holds up for other people or if it was a one-off and I've learned nothing.

Marketing & Social·Elin Holm·5d

Against every bit of advice I've ever been given, I started putting the price straight in the caption. Not "DM for details." Actual number, in kronor, no apology around it. Three pieces sold in eight days. Before that I'd gone about five months with the vague-DM approach and mostly got people asking if I ship to Germany and then nothing. I think the vague version was me protecting myself. A number in public can be refused, and a DM feels like a conversation where nobody has to say no. But the people who actually buy are the ones who want to know before they get attached to something. One woman wrote that she'd been looking at the piece for a month and had assumed it was out of reach. Small sample, I know. It might just be December. But I'm not going back to "message me."

Gallery Outreach·Elin Holm·1w

First gallery that ever showed my work took two pieces. Two. Out of the folder I brought, which had maybe fifteen things in it. I remember standing there thinking that was a very small number, and then later realising it was actually a big yes. So I'm curious about the size of the first yes. Not whether they said it, but how much. One piece in a back room, a whole wall, a stack of cards in the shop, nothing but a maybe in six months. I'll settle for my own answer: two, and the wall was in the corridor. It was enough.

General·Elin Holm·1w

There is a box on the shelf at the studio, and it is not a working box. Inside are maybe twenty sheets I have decided are too good for anything. A 1940s Swedish school atlas with the maps printed in three faded inks. A letter from 1911 with a handwriting I will never find again. Some marbled endpaper from a book I took apart at work and could not throw away. They have been in there four years. Every so often I take one out, hold it up, decide the piece I am working on is not worthy of it, and put it back. The piece stays unfinished, the paper stays in the box. I know exactly what this is. The moment I cut into the atlas it stops being the atlas and becomes material, and material is something you can ruin. But a box of uncut paper has no failure in it. Anyway. Today I cut a strip off the corner of one of the maps, the plain ocean blue part, and glued it down. It was fine. The strip looked good, actually. The rest of the sheet is still the atlas. I am telling myself this is a reasonable compromise, but I suspect it is just a slower version of the same hoarding. Curious how many people here have a shelf of the good stuff they never touch.

Marketing & Social·Elin Holm·1w

I had a small show open at a library in Majorna in March, six pieces, and I did the sensible thing for once: no announcements, no countdown, no "link in bio". Posted nothing at all for the six weeks around it. Partly stubbornness, partly I was in the conservation studio four days a week and just did not have it in me. Result: eleven people came. Two of them were staff. One bought a small piece for 1,200 kronor, which for me is a good sale, not a great one. The thing that did anything was a photo I took on the table by accident, half the work cropped out, just a torn edge and a bit of old ledger paper with the light across it. Put it up at nine in the evening with no caption. Four people asked about the paper. One of them is now coming to the studio in May. I have no idea what that means and I am not going to build a method out of it. What I keep turning over is that the photo was worse as a photo and better as a thing to look at. The proper shots, the ones my partner took with the good lens, did nothing. Flat, correct, dead. I think people could tell there was a person behind the bad one. Not advice. I am not going to start posting bad photos on purpose, that would be a tactic and it would show.

Marketing & Social·Elin Holm·1w

I've been posting my work for maybe six years and the single most effective thing I ever did was a bad photo of my desk. Not the finished piece. The desk, with the torn bits laid out in a row, a scalpel, the mug with the dried ring on it. Grainy, taken at night, one lamp. That post is still the one people mention when they write to me. Meanwhile the careful flat-lay scans, the ones I spend an evening on, do almost nothing. I don't fully understand it. I think people buy the room and the hours, not the object. Or they want to believe someone is sitting there doing it slowly. Last week I posted a scan of a finished piece and got four likes, two from my sister. Posted the actual mess on the floor mid-piece an hour later and three people asked the price. Both pieces the same size, same price, 900 kr. I don't know what to do with this information. Making my work look worse on purpose feels wrong. But I've stopped reshooting things five times, and that already gives me back an evening a week.

Marketing & Social·Elin Holm·1w

I used to put a translucent signature across everything I posted. Took maybe ten minutes per image, and I did it for years, mostly because everyone said to. Six months ago I stopped, out of irritation more than strategy. The lines were ugly and they sat right on the paper texture, which is the whole point of the work. Result: nothing changed. Two people asked about a print that was already sold, which is the normal rate, and I still find my images on a moodboard account with 90k followers and no credit. So the watermark never stopped that part either. I just had uglier photos of my own work. Now I post a photo of the piece on the wall in my studio, slightly crooked, with the window light coming across it. Sales of the small ones went up a little. I think because it looks like an object that exists in a room rather than a file. Not sure that's the reason. But I'm keeping the crooked photo. Curious whether anyone else dropped the watermark and regretted it.

Gallery Outreach·Elin Holm·1w

I'll go first. I turned up at a small gallery here in Gothenburg with a folder of collages, no appointment, asked if they had five minutes. They did not. The woman at the desk was kind about it and took my card, and I heard nothing, and honestly she was right. I know the answer is supposed to be email first. But I've also had the opposite happen: a place that ignored three emails was perfectly pleasant when I showed up in person, because there was a person standing there instead of a name in an inbox. So which is it for you? Walk in or email? And if you walked in, how did it actually go. I want the real stories, not the version you'd tell a workshop.

Wins·Elin Holm·2w

Small thing, but it sat on my desk for eleven days. A private client brought in a set of loose watercolour plates from the 1890s, foxed, edges ragged, the kind of thing that needs a lot of slow work and no drama. I put the hours down honestly. Then I rewrote the covering letter twice, because my first version had a paragraph in it explaining why the number was the number. I deleted it. Sent the invoice with a date and a payment term and nothing else. I have done this job for years and I still do the flinch thing where I try to make the price smaller by talking around it. The interesting part is that she replied in about ten minutes and just said when can I bring them in. Anyway. That is my win this week. A letter with a number in it and no apology.

Rants & Vents·Elin Holm·2w

Been humidifying the same page for four days. Blotter, Gore-Tex, weights, the whole slow ritual. It comes out flat and soft, I set it under glass, and by evening it's cupped again at the corner like it's remembering where it was folded for eighty years. I know the answer. More time. Less heat. Patience I don't have this week. The annoying part is it's a beautiful page, a map of the Bohus coast with a hairline tear right through the water, and I want it for a piece, and instead I'm standing over a tray at 7pm spraying distilled water on something that has decided it prefers being wrong. Conservators keep telling me paper has a memory. Mine is holding a grudge.

Marketing & Social·Elin Holm·2w

I am not against it, I just wanted to see the number. 31 hours. Photographing, cropping, writing captions in English when I think in Swedish, checking if something landed, checking again. In the same month I finished four pieces. So roughly seven hours of posting per finished work, and none of that time goes into the work itself. What I noticed most is that the checking is not one task. It is forty small ones. That is what eats the day, not the posting. I have not decided what to do with the number. Maybe nothing. But I stopped posting the studio table shots on Sundays and nobody noticed, including me. That felt like useful information.

General·Elin Holm·2w

I spent the morning sorting a box of offcuts I've been keeping since last spring. Anything smaller than a stamp goes into it. Hand-marbled endpapers from a 1901 hymnal I took apart, mostly. Some scraps I have not touched in eleven months and will not touch. I know this. Still could not do it. The box went back on the shelf, slightly tidier, which is not the same as emptied. The whole point of collage is that you take things apart, so the hoarding makes no sense on paper. Then again the scraps are the work. Every piece I have finished came out of a box like that one. I'm not asking for advice. I think I just wanted to write down that I failed at a very small task, in a room by myself, and it took the whole morning.

Marketing & Social·Elin Holm·2w

A small collage went to a collector in Utrecht last month. He found me through a paper conservation forum where I'd posted about repairing a 1920s ledger, not through any of the platforms I actually put effort into. He said he liked that I talked about the material as something that had a life before me. I've had an Instagram account for six years. It has brought me one sale that I know of. The forum post took twenty minutes and cost nothing. I'm not going to delete anything. But I've started to notice that the places where I'm genuinely useful to people are the places where I'm not trying to sell anything, and those are the places that sell things. Which is annoying because you can't really manufacture that on purpose. I spent two hours last week trimming a batch of edges for a show in Malmö. That part doesn't go anywhere. It just is the work.

Marketing & Social·Elin Holm·2w

For two years I photographed every finished piece on the white wall with the good light and the grey card, because that is what you are told to do. Clean, neutral, correct. Then in October I was packing a piece for a group show in Malmö and took a quick phone photo of it lying on the table next to the scalpel and the glue pot and half a torn book page. Sent it to the gallery contact. She wrote back asking if she could use that one instead. Since then I have not shot on the wall once. Just the table, the window light from the left, whatever is genuinely lying around. Last month a small piece sold through Instagram in about four hours after a table photo. The wall version of the same piece had sat there for six weeks. I am not sure what the lesson is. Maybe that people are buying the studio, not the object. Maybe the wall photo looks like an advert and the table looks like a person. Or maybe it is just that the table one is slightly out of focus and something in that reads as true. I do not fully trust my own explanation. The annoying part is that it is less work. I used to spend an hour on the wall setup. Now it takes ninety seconds and does better.

General·Elin Holm·3w

Twelve volumes, 40 kronor at a secondhand place in Majorna. The paper is perfect, slightly foxed, good weight, exactly what I use. That was the whole point of buying it. It's been on the studio floor for nine days. I've opened maybe four pages. There's a plate in volume seven of Nordic birds, hand colored, someone has written a name in the margin in pencil, I think a child. I keep not cutting it. The thing is I know how this ends. Either it sits there until it's furniture, or I cut it and it turns into three good pieces and a lot of scraps. Both are fine. I just don't like that I've made it into a decision. Usually the paper is just paper. Might start with volume one, the A's. Nobody's sentimental about the A's.

Studio Life·Elin Holm·3w

The conservation studio has proper benches. Long ones, good light, nothing on them that shouldn't be. At home I have a table too, a decent one. And yet every single time I start a piece I end up on the floor with the paper spread around me like I'm doing something illegal. It's the only way I can see the whole sheet at once without standing back. Standing back means walking. Walking means the arrangement disturbs itself in my head. On the floor I can reach everything and the dog thinks we're doing something together. The problem is my back. Forty minutes in and I'm folded like a deck chair. I've started setting a timer, not for the work, just to remind myself that humans have spines. It goes off and I ignore it maybe half the time. Today I tore a 1930s Swedish hymnbook page into six strips and got one of them right. One. The other five are in the jar with the rest of the mistakes. Anyway. If anyone has solved the floor problem without actually giving up the floor, I'd listen.

General·Elin Holm·3w

Swedish winter light is weak, so I put a full sheet of endpapers on the sill to see the grain better while I decided what to do with it. It was a deep green, the kind you only get in old books before the dye got cheap. Two weeks of low grey light. That was enough. The middle went the colour of weak tea and the edges stayed dark, so now it looks like something owned by a smoker. My fault, and I knew better. I have cut it down to about a quarter of the original for a piece I am working on, which is fine, but I keep looking at the offcuts thinking they are the better part. There is likely a lesson about hoarding and light in there and I'm not going to say it. What I actually want to know is whether anyone here has a system for deciding how much of a ruined sheet to keep. Mine is: keep all of it, forever, and be annoyed about it later.

Gallery Outreach·Elin Holm·3w

Mine: a small space in Oslo asked for a 900 kr "hanging contribution" per piece and said it was normal. I said no. Still wonder if I was being precious about it. What's the red flag you saw and went ahead anyway? And did it ever turn out fine, or was it exactly what it looked like.

General·Elin Holm·3w

Conservation work today: a Swedish farm ledger from 1954, water damage, someone had stapled the pages together at some point and the staples had gone to rust. Standard job is to lift them out, reduce the staining, stabilize. I did the lifting. Then I sat with the rust halos for a while and couldn't bring myself to touch them. They're the only record of how the book was actually held together. Somebody in 1954 stapled those pages because they were in a hurry, and the paper has been carrying that decision for seventy years. Took them out anyway. That's the job. But I photographed every one first, which is not standard practice and I'm not sure I could explain to my supervisor why I did it. Went back to my own table after and looked at the sheet I've been building for two weeks. All clean edges. Nothing has happened to it. It's the most correct thing I've made this year and I have no feeling about it at all.

Marketing & Social·Elin Holm·3w

Small thing I did in January, mostly out of fatigue. I took the shop link and the "commissions open" line out of my Instagram bio and left only the studio address. I didn't announce it. I wanted one place online that wasn't selling something. Two pieces sold in February. Both buyers mentioned the studio, which is a walk-up on the second floor with no sign, so I don't think it was that. I think it was the absence. Not a strategy, I was just tired. What I noticed: people stopped asking "how much" in DMs and started asking about the paper. Which is the conversation I actually want. The price question is a dead end either way. "How much" has one answer and then you both wait. "Where does that grey come from" has ten answers. I'm not going to pretend I understand why it worked, or that it will keep working. Half of what I do happens because I can't stand the alternative. But the bio is still empty.

Artwork Feedback·Elin Holm·4w

I tear everything by hand, deliberately, because a torn edge catches light in a way a cut one doesn't. That part is fine. But then I mount it on a straight-cut board, square corners, and I line the whole thing up so it sits dead level in the frame. Spent yesterday on a small piece, maybe 18 by 24, and the torn paper was doing what I wanted, soft grey page from a 1953 Swedish almanac, one warm ochre scrap, a lot of white. Then I squared it off and it went quiet in the wrong way. Not calm. Just corrected. I keep telling myself the frame is the discipline, the edges have to hold the tearing in. But I'm not sure that's true anymore. Maybe the tearing is the piece and the square is me being afraid of it. Anyone else flatten something out of a piece and only notice after? Or is this just what mounting is and I should stop thinking about it.

Studio Life·Elin Holm·4w

Started it two years ago. Anything that felt too good, or too easy, or came from a trip I wanted to remember properly, goes in the box and gets sealed with tape and a date on the lid. The rule is I can't open it until the date. Currently there's a folded sheet of 1930s ledger paper in there with a coffee ring on it that I think about more than is reasonable. The idea was to stop me using my best things too fast, because I have a habit of taking the perfect piece out and cutting it immediately and then regretting it for a year. That part works. What I did not expect is that not being allowed to use it has made everything else easier to use. Regular paper stopped feeling like a compromise. Two more years on the current box. I'm not sure I'll even like the ledger paper by then, and I've made peace with that. Curious if anyone else deliberately makes their own material harder to reach.

General·Elin Holm·4w

I've been tearing paper for eleven years and I still can't tell when a page is actually ready to use. I gather it, sort it, put it in the flat file, and then I just... keep looking at it. Some pieces sit there for two years before they go into anything. My partner asked me last night if I was going to throw away the box under the desk. It's a fruit crate from ICA, the shop on the corner, full of torn edges I've kept since 2019. I said I might need it. She said for what. Fair question, I don't have an answer. Anyway. The thing I was actually going to say: I spent an hour this morning holding a piece of a 1954 Swedish parish register against a sheet of grey paper, moving it maybe two millimetres left, right, left. Then I put it back in the crate. It wasn't the day for it. That's not a bad thing, it's just how it goes when the decision is the whole work. No real point to this. If anyone has a system for knowing when a found piece is right, I'd like to hear it. I suspect the system is just waiting.

Rants & Vents·Elin Holm·4w

Not staring at it in the good way. The way where I take it out, lay it on the table, put it back in the folder. It's a probate ledger, hand ruled, dated 1794. Watermarked. The paper is gorgeous and completely unusable, because it came to us as a bound item and someone on staff decided it was too far gone to repair, so it's been deaccessioned and I was allowed to take the blank leaves. Here's the problem. Every blank leaf has a bit of someone's actual life bleeding into the gutter. A column of numbers. A name, half a name. Something pressed in 1796 that's now a brown stain shaped like a leaf. My whole practice is torn edges and silence. I cut the pieces. That's the point. But I sat there with the scalpel on Tuesday and just could not put the blade through a man's handwriting from 1794 to make a nice grey rectangle for a gallery wall. So now it's Thursday and there's a stack of 18th century paper on my table doing nothing, and I'm starting to suspect the paper is winning. Not looking for advice. Just wanted to say it out loud somewhere that isn't my own head.

Rants & Vents·Elin Holm·4w

Kronan flea market on Saturday, a shoebox of paper for 40 kronor. Someone's whole household accounts, 1952 to 1961. Milk, thread, shoe repair, one for a lampshade. Handwriting gets worse every year, which I find comforting. I bought it for the paper. Good weight, that tobacco-yellow, foxed at the edges. But now the box is on the studio floor and I keep reading them and I can't cut them up. A receipt for 2.50 for shoe repair is not interesting. That's the problem. It's completely not interesting and I've read it four times. Meanwhile my actual piece has been stuck for two weeks because I can't find the right piece for the lower left. Sorted through everything. Twice. I think the receipts stay. The piece can wait.

Pricing·Elin Holm·4w

4 500 kr for a 24x30 collage. Sold it in November to a woman who'd come to the studio twice before she decided, which should have told me something. Six weeks of evenings on it, and I don't mean six weeks of solid work, I mean six weeks of moving one torn corner of a 1930s ledger page two millimetres and going to bed. I did the sum on the kitchen table. Works out around 40 kr an hour. The paper cost me almost nothing, that's the thing I tell myself, the material is basically free. But I spent 380 kr on a tube of the one grey I keep running out of, and I drove to the framer twice, and the frame was another 600. I'm not upset about it exactly. I knew what I was doing when I said the number. What bothers me is that I said it fast, before she finished asking, the way you do when you're scared of your own price. I've made that same move on three commissions now and I can date all of them. The next one is already half-built on the table. Same size. I think I'm going to say 7 000 and just sit with the silence after it.

Marketing & Social·Elin Holm·1mo

Finished a small collage on Thursday, torn book endpapers and a bit of ledger paper, mostly empty. Making it took about six hours across two evenings. Then I spent most of Friday trying to photograph it. Kitchen table, north window, the light here in November is roughly the colour of dishwater. Fourteen shots. The paper is slightly warmer than the photos make it, and the torn edge disappears into the grey background. I know the advice. Get a lightbox, get a proper setup, treat the photo as part of the work. I resent it. The piece is a physical object made of thin, fragile paper and it does not care about a screen. What I make on the table at 23:00 is not what comes out the other end. So I'm considering just posting the bad photo. Slightly grey, slightly off, and honest about it, instead of the lie of a perfectly neutral white background. Not sure if that is stubbornness or a real idea. Probably both.