Studio Life·Inês Costa·9h

Small thing, but it has changed how I work. Before I coat a sheet I pencil the date and the weather on the back corner: sun, cloud, wind direction, how cold the water was. Nothing more than that. I started because I could not remember, months later, why one print came out so much softer than the one beside it. Same paper, same mixture, same seaweed. The only difference was the sky that afternoon in November, and I had not written it down. Now I have a drawer of these little notes and I look at them more than I should. It turns out the prints I love are almost never the ones made in full sun. They are the ones made under a thin white overcast, with the sea a bit rough, because I was impatient and pulled the paper early. It is a very small ritual and probably nobody else would care about it. But it makes the work feel less like something I am doing to the paper and more like something we did together that day.

Wins·Inês Costa·1d

Drove out to Matosinhos at six this morning with a box of paper I'd coated the night before, and did a run of six photograms on the flat rocks below the fish market, using the tide pools as my trays. Two came out. One of those is the best print I've made this year and I genuinely do not know why it worked, which is a strange thing to feel pleased about. I can tell you the paper was 300g Fabriano, coated a bit too thick, and the sun came through the haze for maybe ninety seconds of the exposure and then went. That is all I have. The other four are in the bin, and I'm not sorry about it. I think the thing I am actually happy about is that I stopped trying to repeat last spring's results. For months I was chasing a print I made in April, the same weed, same rock, same hour, and every one of them was a pale copy of a memory. Today I just put the paper down and let the sea do what it does. Anyway. Six sheets, two prints, one that might be something. The rest of the day is for sleeping in the sun like a cat.

Wins·Inês Costa·2d

A woman came to the studio on Saturday, spent maybe twenty minutes in front of the biggest cyanotype I have, the 70x100 with the net dragged across it, and then said she wanted it for her hallway. I wrapped it in the paper I always use and she carried it out herself. Then I sat in the car for a while before I could drive. Not sadness exactly. That piece was on the wall behind me for eleven months, through two winters, and I had got used to turning round and finding it there. Now there is a pale rectangle where it hung, and the wall looks undressed. I have sold work before. This one was different, I think because I had almost stopped believing it was any good. It came out of a morning when nothing worked, the solution was old, the sun went in, and I nearly rinsed the paper and started again. I did not. I hung it up to dry out of habit and it was the best thing I made all year. Anyway. The car park behind the studio smells of diesel and there was a man loading tiles into a van beside me, and I just sat there with the empty tube on the passenger seat.

Gallery Outreach·Inês Costa·3d

When I first showed the cyanotypes, the woman at the desk looked at them a long time and then asked if they were finished. The white edges, the brush marks, the slight bleed where the seawater got past the tape. She meant it kindly, I think, but it stayed with me for weeks. I said yes. They are exactly as finished as I want them. But I drove home wondering whether I should have said something better. So, what is the strangest or most useful thing a gallery has said about how you make the work? Not the price talk, the process talk. Did it change anything, or did you keep going as you were?

Wins·Inês Costa·4d

Small one. I've been rinsing the cyanotypes in tap water for two years, out of habit and a bit of fear, and this week I finally just carried a tray down to the rocks at Foz and let the Atlantic finish them. I expected to lose the lot. Instead the blues came out softer, with a grain in the paper I've been trying to fake with brushes. One of them, a photogram of a piece of net I picked up in Matosinhos, has a shadow in the corner from where a wave came over the tray edge. I would have thrown that away before. My father would have laughed at me standing in the water with paper. Not unkindly. Anyway, I'm not going back to tap water for the final wash.

Rants & Vents·Inês Costa·6d

Fourteen sheets of Arches, the good cold press, ordered in June and waited on for five weeks. I came home from the beach at half past six and the box was standing upright against the gate, in the rain, like it had been asked to wait there politely. The cardboard was so soft it opened with two fingers. The paper inside is not ruined exactly. That is the maddening part. It is a little wavy at the edges and the sizing has that feel to it now, slightly dull under the thumb, and I will spend the next month wondering if the blues are going to come out right or if I am going to be blaming a courier in January for something that was my own fault with an exposure. I did not shout at anyone. I unwrapped it, laid it flat under books, made tea, and then sat looking at the stack for a while feeling something I would rather not name in public. My partner said well, at least it is only paper. He is a good man and he meant it kindly and I have not spoken to him since. Anyway. If anyone knows whether damp paper can be brought back with a long press and patience, I am listening. If not, I am going to keep pressing it and pretending.

General·Inês Costa·1w

I make my cyanotypes with seawater instead of tap, which I know sounds romantic and is mostly just practical, the sea is a two minute walk and the tap water here is very hard anyway. But the tray of it has been on the balcony since Tuesday and I have not gone near it. The thing about seawater is it does not stay the same. Something in it keeps working on the print after you think you have finished. Two days in and the blues start to go slightly green at the edges, then a sort of grey comes up from underneath. Sometimes it is beautiful. Sometimes the whole thing turns to dishwater and there is nothing to do but start again with a fresh sheet. So now I am standing in the kitchen looking at the balcony door, knowing there is a print in there that is either the best thing I have made this year or a dead loss, and either way it is already too late to change it. I have been finding small reasons not to go out. I watered the plants twice. I will look tomorrow. I always say tomorrow.

Gallery Outreach·Inês Costa·1w

A small practical thing I have never solved. When you go see a gallery in person, what do you carry in with you? I have tried both ways and neither felt right. The first time I brought a box of prints, maybe twelve blue sheets wrapped in tissue, and I could not bring myself to open it. It stayed under my arm the whole visit and I left with the box still closed and my ears hot. The second time I brought nothing at all, only myself, and the conversation was lovely and warm and then simply ended, and I realised I had nothing to leave behind. Now I bring a single print, one only, small, and a card with my name on it. It feels less like a presentation and more like showing someone a shell you picked up on the beach. But I am not sure it is the right instinct. So, what goes in your bag? Portfolio, one piece, phone, nothing, a bottle of wine for the person at the desk? And does anyone actually ask to see it, or do you have to offer first? Tell me I have been doing it wrong, I can take it.

Pricing·Inês Costa·1w

They said yes without blinking, and I have been uneasy about it since. Twelve prints, 30x40, each one a separate exposure. Which means twelve sheets of paper I have to coat by hand, twelve days at least of waiting for the right sun, and the seawater. Two of them I will almost certainly ruin and start again. There is no file I can send. If the wind comes off the land and brings dust, the whole morning is gone. I worked out afterwards what it comes to per hour and it was not good. But that is not really what bothers me. What bothers me is that they agreed so quickly that I have no idea what the work is worth to them. Maybe 260 is nothing to a gallery. Maybe I could have said 400 and they would have said yes in the same breath. I will never know now, and that is my own fault for naming a number I was comfortable with instead of the one I actually needed. The prints go up in July. I am glad of the show. I am just tired of learning this lesson the slow way, one too-cheap summer at a time.

Gallery Outreach·Inês Costa·1w

Mine was almost an accident. I had a stack of cyanotypes still smelling of salt, and I walked into a small place near Ribeira that showed photographs. No appointment, no portfolio binder, just the prints in a folder under my arm. The woman behind the desk looked at them for a long time and then asked what the blue was. That was it. She gave me a wall in a group show that autumn. I think about that often, how little prepared I was and how much it worked because I was just carrying the actual work, not a plan. So I want to hear yours. How did the first one happen? Cold email, a friend, an open call, a walk-in like mine? And was it luck or did you do the work to be there that day?

Artwork Feedback·Inês Costa·1w

I coated six sheets on Monday for a small show in April, all Arches, all the same 12 percent mix I have used for two years. Hung them on the line to dry and felt nothing. The problem is not the technique. The edges are clean, the exposures are even, the seawater did what seawater does. That is exactly the trouble. I have made these prints before, better, and now I am just repeating myself with more confidence. What I think happened is I stopped being surprised by my own materials. I know what the seaweed will do. I know the net will go soft at the edges. So I place it, I wait, I rinse, I get what I expected. There is no conversation anymore, only instructions. I have one sheet left from that batch. Thinking of coating it badly on purpose, too thick in one corner, letting it pool, not fixing the negative flat, and seeing if the mess says something I did not plan. Or maybe that is just a way to avoid admitting the real answer, which is that I should be working on something else entirely and I do not yet know what. If anyone here has come out of a stretch like this, I would like to know what actually did it. Not the advice version. The thing you did.

Gallery Outreach·Inês Costa·1w

A small thing I keep turning over. I had a studio visit last spring with a gallery I genuinely liked, two people, very kind, spent almost an hour. At the end one of them said they'd like to "see more work." No timeline, no follow-up date, nothing. I sent a link ten days later and heard nothing for two months, then a very warm email that also said nothing. I still don't know if I did the wrong thing by not pushing harder, or if "see more work" is just how it goes. So, the question: when a gallery says that to you, what do you actually do next? Do you send more, do you wait, do you ask them straight out what they mean? Also curious whether anyone has had that sentence turn into a real show, because I would like to believe it does.

Wins·Inês Costa·2w

I've been making a series on the beach at Aguda since February. Same stretch, same black rocks, same two hours before the tide turns. What changed is that I started developing the sheets in seawater I carry up from there in a plastic can instead of the tap water in my studio. The prints come out softer, less certain of their own edges. I've been calling that a flaw in my head for four months. A woman bought one on Saturday. The one where the net drags across the top corner, the one I nearly threw away twice because the exposure went too long and the blue got so deep the weed reads almost black. She said it looked like something recovered from water rather than made. I stood there and took her money and said thank you and felt weirdly close to tears. I think the win is not the sale. It's that I stopped treating the sea as contamination in my own process. For years I've been correcting it out. Anyone else here sell the piece that embarrassed them a little? I don't mean the commissioned one. The one you almost didn't put in the folder.

Gallery Outreach·Inês Costa·2w

I'll go first, and it is not flattering. The only gallery that ever said yes to me, I got because I walked in during a quiet Tuesday afternoon with three cyanotypes in a folder, still smelling faintly of salt, and the woman at the desk happened to be the one who hung the shows. She looked at them for maybe forty seconds and asked where the sea was. That was it. Every careful email I ever sent, with the PDF and the artist statement and the polite paragraph about my practice, got a no or nothing at all. So I am genuinely unsure if I got lucky or if I have been doing the emails wrong for years. Which one actually works for you, the email or the walking in? And if it is the email, tell me what you put in it, because mine are clearly not landing.

Pricing·Inês Costa·2w

Someone asked me at the Feira da Vandoma last month what a cyanotype costs, and I heard myself say "it depends on the paper," which is true and also a way of not answering. Here is the real thing. A 30x40 print on Arches, seawater-developed, sun for however long it takes that day, I ask 120. It could be three hours of work or it could be four days of waiting for the right light and starting over. I don't count. If I counted I would have to charge something nobody in that market is going to pay, and I am not sure I would want to charge it either. So the price is a kind of average of the good days and the ruined ones. It works out. It is also the reason I have never said a number out loud here, and why I felt a small shame writing 120 just now. What I keep circling is this. The friends who ask me to make them something, "just a small one for the hallway," I say yes and then it is not small and it is not free and I have spent a fortnight on it, and I cannot find the door out of that conversation. Not asking anyone to solve it. I think I just wanted to write the number down somewhere.

Marketing & Social·Inês Costa·2w

For years I posted only the prints that came out clean. The ones where the fern held its shape, where the wash went even, where the paper didn't buckle at the edge. Nice squares, no mess. Then in February I ruined a whole batch. Too much sun, I left them out maybe twenty minutes too long and the whole thing went flat, no depth left in the blue at all. I photographed the worst one anyway and put it up. Just the ruin. No caption saying look at my process, nothing like that. More people wrote to me about that one print than about a year of the good ones. One woman in Galway asked if she could buy it. A man asked what tide I'd pulled the net from, which felt like the right question to be asked. I think people are tired of being shown the result. They want to see the hand that is not sure. I don't want to turn that into a formula either, because then it becomes another performance. But it changed how I think about what is worth putting into the world. I have three ruined sheets on the studio wall now. I like them more than the ones that worked. Not sure yet if that is a good sign or just me getting older.

Pricing·Inês Costa·2w

I priced a cyanotype at 240 euros for a small show here in Porto. Framed, 30x40, one of the big seaweed pieces from last August. Then I did the math properly, which I almost never do. Three days of work, plus the paper, the frame, the emulsion, and the fact that I lost an entire week of sun in July waiting for a print that didn't go grey. Divided out, that's less than I pay my neighbour to watch the cat. The gallery took 40 percent. I said yes before I had finished saying the number, which is a habit I'm trying to break. I think what bothers me is not the money. It's that I priced it like a picture of something, and it isn't. It's a piece of the Atlantic on paper and it took a whole summer to get right. So. 240. I'm putting that here so I have to look at it. What would you have asked? I honestly don't know where my own ceiling is anymore.

Artwork Feedback·Inês Costa·2w

I developed a photogram of a piece of net in seawater this week, which I do often, but I left it in longer than usual, maybe forty minutes, and the water crept up the paper unevenly and left a hard line across the middle where it stopped. Everything above it is pale, washed out, almost nothing. Below it the blue is deep and the net reads clearly. Two prints in one sheet, basically. I've been staring at it for three days. Part of me thinks the line is the whole point, that it says something about where the water reached and where it didn't, and I should stop trying to make it stop happening. The other part thinks I've just made a mistake and I'm dressing it up because I don't want to start again. What I keep coming back to is that I can't reproduce it. If I decide the line is the piece, I have about as much control over the next one as I do over the weather. And I'm not sure I'm honest enough with myself to know whether I like it or whether I'm tired. I've had prints where the accident was clearly a gift and I knew it straight away. This one I genuinely don't know. That's the part I'd like help with, if anyone has a way of telling the difference that isn't just waiting a month and hoping you feel differently.

Pricing·Inês Costa·3w

A boutique hotel in Lisbon, they are doing the corridors in the old building near the river. Fourteen cyanotypes, all one size, all of the same stretch of coast so they hang as a sequence. Nice project, actually. I like the idea of a person walking to their room past fourteen pieces of the same shoreline in different weather. I sat down with the paper and the chemistry and worked out it is about 46 hours of work, plus the Arches, plus the ferric ammonium citrate and the potassium ferricyanide, plus replacing two sheets I will ruin, because I always ruin two. I quoted 2,100. Then I did it again a week later and I do not know why I did that to myself. Works out at maybe 22 an hour before I take anything out for the studio, the electricity, the glass, the fact that I have been doing this for fifteen years and I am still pricing like someone who is grateful to be asked. The thing that makes it worse is I know I would have said yes at 1,400 if they had pushed. That number is sitting in my head now like a stone in a shoe. They have not replied yet. I half hope they say no so I can quote it again properly.

Pricing·Inês Costa·3w

A woman at the last market stood in front of the big one for a long time. A 50x70 photogram, seaweed and a piece of net, developed in water I walked down and got at Foz the week before. She liked it. Then she said, well, the sun does most of it, no? So it should be cheaper, no? I think I said something polite. What I wanted to say is that the salt is free and also the whole point, and that I ruin about one in three sheets before one survives. I asked 380. Not the number I wanted, the number I said out loud. I had worked it out at home properly, paper, chemistry, the mounting, the days, and it kept coming to around 520 if I wanted to be paid like a person who was doing something real. Not a large sum, but the difference between 380 and 520 is not small when it is your month. She did not buy it. Someone else did, two markets later, at the same price, without any talk about the sun. So the price was fine and I was the problem, standing there letting a stranger make the case for my own work being cheap. The next one I ask 520. I already know I will be nervous. Writing it here so it is at least on the record before I go and do the other thing again.

Wins·Inês Costa·3w

Small thing, but it has been sitting on me since Tuesday. A woman who organises a small art fair in Matosinhos wrote to me in January and asked if I wanted a table in March. I said I would think about it, which is what I always say. Then I forgot, or made myself forget. She wrote again on Tuesday. Eleven exhibitors, a room above the fish market, three days. I typed the reply and deleted it four times before I sent it. The yes is nine words long. It took me most of the afternoon. I have been making work the whole time, that was never the problem. The problem is the part where it goes out into a room with strangers and a price on it, and I have become very good at avoiding that part. Two years of it. Enough prints to fill a wall and nobody has seen them. What convinced me in the end was stupid and small. I was rinsing a sheet in the sea at Foz on Sunday, the water was 13 degrees, and I thought, the paper has already survived worse than a fair in Matosinhos. So. Nine weeks. I need to build frames, which I hate, and work out how to price things, which I hate more. If anyone has done one of these small local fairs, I would take advice. But mostly I just wanted to say it out loud, because now I cannot quietly not do it.

Wins·Inês Costa·3w

Every cyanotype I make gets developed in sun and seawater, and that is usually beautiful. This week I did a set in the dark, under my own hands, timing the exposure second by second instead of letting the sky decide. I had been avoiding it because I thought losing the sun would flatten everything. It did the opposite. Four prints of a scallop net, all of them finally the blue I keep seeing in my head and never quite got on paper, that deep cold blue the sea goes in January when nobody is in it. I have been printing for years and I still cannot explain why the same formula, the same paper, gives me a different blue depending on the day. But now I know I can hold the door shut myself when I need to. The sun is back tomorrow. I will go back to the beach with the paper and let it do what it wants. It just feels good to know I am not only waiting for weather anymore.

Pricing·Inês Costa·3w

I finally worked up the courage to ask a gallery in Lisbon to take some of my cyanotypes. Twelve pieces, seaweed and net photograms, all of them made with seawater from the beach near my flat. She offered me 180 each. I said yes because I was tired and because she said it in a way that made 180 sound like a favour. They went up in her window at 520. Three sold before Christmas. I know about the standard split, I know she has rent to pay and she has to make it worth her while. I am not naive about that. What I did not expect is how quiet it made me feel, walking past that window, doing the arithmetic in my head every time. My paper costs about 9 euros a sheet and I ruin maybe one in four. The seawater I carry up from the shore in a bucket like an idiot. I don't say any of that to her because it sounds like I want pity rather than a fair price. I wrote a new number down in my notebook and I have not sent it yet. 340. Which still feels like too much and also like not enough, and I cannot tell which of those is the honest one. What I keep circling is that she never asked what I wanted for them. She just told me a number, and I took it, the way I always do. That part is mine.

Studio Life·Inês Costa·3w

There is a bucket by the door that I use for the final rinse, and I stopped emptying it at some point in June. Maybe July. The water has gone a strange pale blue, almost grey, and there is a smell now, salt and something older underneath. It started because I was lazy. Then I noticed the prints that came out of it were softer at the edges, the blue less hard, and I told myself that was a reason to keep it. I'm not sure that's true. I think I just like that it is there, holding all the hours I spent over it, and pouring it away feels like throwing out a day. My partner asked this morning if it was going to live there forever. I said probably not. We both knew I was lying. Does anyone else keep something in the studio that has stopped being useful and you keep it anyway? Or is it only me who hoards the water.

Gallery Outreach·Inês Costa·4w

I want to ask something slightly different from the usual first-gallery stories. Mine: I sent a small body of blue prints to a space here in Porto years ago. Nice reply, "not for us right now," very polite. Two years later I walked past and they were showing something so close to what I had sent that I stood there in the rain feeling strange about it. Not angry exactly. Just strange. I never said anything, and I still don't know if that was the right call. So, has that happened to you? A no that turned into someone else's yes, or a no that later turned out to be a gift. And the small question underneath it, because I think we all carry one: did you ever write back after a rejection, or did you let it go quiet like I did. I would genuinely like to know. It helps to hear how other people carry these things.

Artwork Feedback·Inês Costa·4w

Not a critique anyone gave me. Just something I have been sitting with all week. I have a photogram of a piece of fishing net I picked off the sand at Foz in October. The net is right. The edges are right. Twenty-two minutes under the sun, seawater wash, and every knot reads clean against the paper. Technically it is the best exposure I have made this year. And I feel nothing in front of it. It looks like a diagram of a net. The ones I keep pinned to the wall are all failures. A print from last winter where the wind moved the paper and the whole lower half smeared into a soft gray, and there, right at the smear, is something I have never been able to make on purpose. I have tried to reproduce it maybe forty times since. No luck. I am starting to think the accident is not a mistake I should be learning to control. It is the actual thing. I know some of you will say ruin it deliberately, and I have tried that too, and deliberate ruin looks exactly like what it is. There is a difference between a thing going wrong and a thing being let go of. Anyway. I am not looking for a fix exactly. Maybe just someone to tell me they have the same drawer of technically correct, spiritually empty work and what they did with it.

Gallery Outreach·Inês Costa·4w

I have done both and I still cannot decide which is worse. My first real show came from walking in. I had a folder of cyanotypes, salt still on some of them, and I stood in the doorway until the woman at the desk looked up. We talked for maybe ten minutes, mostly about the sea. She gave me a slot in a group show two months later. I am sure I was lucky. The emails, I have sent many. Most go nowhere, which is fine, but a few have turned into something. Harder to read a room that way. So which is it for you. Do you write first, or do you carry the work in and take your chances with whoever is at the desk? And has the one you chose ever actually worked.

Marketing & Social·Inês Costa·4w

A woman from a hotel group in Lisbon emailed last week about two of the blue prints. Not for a gallery wall. For a bathroom, one of those big ones with the freestanding tub and the single olive branch. The fee they offered: 180 euros for both, printed, for three years. I buy my paper from a small place in Barcelona. A single sheet of the heavy cotton is almost 9 euros now, and I ruin about one in four between coating and washing. That is before the sea, the hours, the fix. I said no, politely, and she wrote back that their budget was fixed and it was "a lovely exposure for the work." The exposure line. I keep thinking about how many people have said it to me and how little it has ever done. Once, years ago, I let a magazine use a print for free and I did get two sales from it, so I cannot say it never works. But 180 for two, printed, was not a negotiation, it was a rounding error for them. I am not asking how to price things. I know my number. I am just tired of the moment in the email where the other person decides my materials do not count.

Studio Life·Inês Costa·4w

I keep my brushes in the freezer. The wide hake ones, the ones I use to lay the sensitiser. Not for any reason I can defend. It started one August when the studio was thirty-four degrees and the coating was drying before it reached the paper, and someone told me cold brushes hold the emulsion longer. So I put them in the freezer overnight and the next morning the coating went down like water on glass. Now it is February and they are still in there, between the frozen peas and a bag of coffee I forgot about. My partner opened it last night looking for ice and just looked at me. I said nothing. There is nothing to say. The brushes live in the freezer now. Today I coated six sheets of Arches, hung them to dry in the dark, and the light through the window was the flat grey that means rain by four. I used to fight days like this. Now I just coat fewer sheets and let the sky decide. The brushes will be cold when I take them out and that is the whole of my method.

Studio Life·Inês Costa·4w

There's a plastic bucket under the sink in the studio, one of those cheap ones from the hardware shop on Rua da Alegria, and it's been full of seawater since February. I collected it during a swim, when it was so cold the water felt like it had teeth, thought I might use it for a series I was starting. Never started it. Now it's just there. The water has gone a bit cloudy, there's some sediment at the bottom, a few bits of something green that didn't fully break down. My partner asked last week if I was keeping it on purpose and I honestly didn't have an answer. It smells faintly of the sea still, which is strange after five months in a dark cupboard. I know I should pour it out. But there's a small superstition in me that says the water from that particular morning matters, that I'll need it for something and the tap water won't do. Meanwhile there's no room under the sink for the new bucket. Do you keep things past their use, on the chance that a project will come and claim them?