Studio Life·Inês Costa·11h

I've been working without a clock all week. Cyanotype needs sun and it needs a certain patience, and I got tired of crouching over the prints with my phone in my hand like some kind of anxious parent. So I just put three pieces out this morning and left them. Went back to the kitchen, made coffee, forgot about them properly. One came out almost white, the clouds had moved in and I'd missed it. Another one went so dark the seaweed disappeared into the blue entirely. But the third one, that one had been out during the exact hour the light was right, and it's the best thing I've made in a month. The paper knew better than my timer did. My grandmother used to say the tide waits for no one, but the sun is more forgiving. It comes back tomorrow. Not sure I'm going back to the stopwatch. Worth losing a few prints for the ones that actually listen.

Rants & Vents·Inês Costa·1d

A man on the beach yesterday, watching me pin wet paper to a board in the wind, came over and asked if I could "fix the exposure" on a photo he'd taken of his wife. He had his phone out, already scrolling for it. I said this is not that kind of photography. He looked at the blue print, then at his screen, then back, and said oh, so it's like a filter. I didn't correct him. I just held the paper down and let the sun do its work while he walked off. But I've been turning it over all evening. Everything I do is slow and uncertain and half out of my control, and people keep wanting it to be a shortcut to something else. Nobody asks a painter if they can just crop it. Maybe it's my fault for working in public. The sea makes people think everything is easy.

Wins·Inês Costa·2d

Found a roll of prints I'd hidden away at the back of the shelf, from a week in January two years ago when the river was high and everything I exposed came out muddy and flat. I had written them all off. Today I fished one out, held it to the light, and the watermarks had settled into something I never saw then. Not what I wanted it to be, but what it actually is. A whole different print. I think I was too close to the wanting then to see what was already there. Spent the afternoon flattening the rest under the big atlas. Sometimes the paper just needs to wait longer than you do.

Marketing & Social·Inês Costa·3d

I made a careful little video last week. Me explaining the cyanotype process, coating the paper, the chemistry, why seawater instead of plain water. Good lighting. I even wrote a script. It got maybe 90 views. The day before, I'd thrown a phone clip up without thinking. Just me wading into the surf holding a wet print, letting the wave take it for half a second before I pulled it back. No talking. Grainy. My partner's shadow in the corner. That one has four thousand views and people are asking where to buy the paper. I keep being surprised by this and I should stop being surprised by it. The thing people want from the work is not the knowing, it's the feeling of almost-losing it. I don't know what to do with that except maybe stop making the careful videos.

Marketing & Social·Inês Costa·5d

A friend asked me last week what my process is, and I tried to explain the two-week one. The one where I kept failing at getting the seaweed to sit right, burnt three sheets, ruined the fixing bath, got it eventually and it's the piece I'm proudest of all year. And then I told her about the other one, the one that sells consistently: a print I made in eleven minutes during a rain break, tossed a piece of net on a wet sheet, didn't even think about it. That one sells. Over and over. People comment on it constantly. The careful one sits in a drawer. I don't know what that says. Maybe the fast ones carry less effort and more luck and people feel that. Or maybe the thing I fought for two weeks has all my doubt baked in, and you can see it even through the Prussian blue. Some prints just breathe easier than others. I keep telling myself the slow one is the better work, and maybe it is. But the market keeps telling me something else, and I'm old enough now to wonder if ignoring it is stubbornness dressed up as integrity.

General·Inês Costa·6d

I kept a jar of seawater on the shelf after a day of printing instead of pouring it back. Forgot about it for two weeks. When I finally used it the blues came out softer, almost dusty, like the color had gone to sleep. Same paper, same sun, same time under the glass. I've been chasing that exact tone ever since and the fresh seawater won't give it to me. Now I'm the person with a shelf of aging saltwater jars, labeling them by date like wine. My partner says it's a kitchen full of sea and I think he's right but I'm not stopping. There's a whole chemistry happening in there I never learned properly. Bacteria, evaporation, the iron settling. I like not fully knowing, honestly. Some things should keep a little mystery.

Marketing & Social·Inês Costa·1w

A reel of my hands pinning wet paper to the line did more reach in three days than a year of finished prints. I watched the numbers climb and felt nothing but a small cold dread. That's not the work. That's me doing chores in front of the sun. I know the argument. People buy the maker, the process, the story. And part of me wants to believe it because the audience is real and they write kind things. But the thing I actually sweat over, the arranging of the seaweed, the waiting for the right light, the fixing that goes wrong and I bins it and starts again, none of that translates to a phone screen. So what's left is me standing there with a squeegee. Maybe I'm old-fashioned about what counts as showing the work. But I don't want to become a person who performs making because the performance is what performs. The prints keep coming either way. I just wonder sometimes whether I'm building an audience for the wrong thing.

General·Inês Costa·1w

For years I've rinsed my prints in the sea. Not always, but when the light is right I carry the paper down to the water and let the tide do the washing for me, the way I've always done it. This year the tide tables shifted somehow, or I did. I kept arriving at the water when it was already on its way out, so the prints came up half-bleached in spots where the foam worked them too long. There's something humbling about being told your timing is off by the ocean itself. No negotiating with that. I found myself missing the prints that failed the worst. One of them has this big pale scar across the middle where the water stayed too long, and it might be the truest thing I've made in months. I keep it pinned where I can see it. Wondering if I should start trusting the mistakes more than the plan. The sea seems to think so.

Studio Life·Inês Costa·1w

Set up thirty sheets on the rocks this morning, weighted with stones, the good glass held down with fishing net. Sun was perfect, low and honest. Then the sea did what the sea does and came in sooner than I planned. Watched the Prussian blue wash away, sheet by sheet, like the paper had never held anything at all. Some of them I'd coaxed for days. The seaweed pressed just so, the exposure timed to the morning light. I keep telling myself the ocean is the collaborator. Today it felt more like the editor. Cut everything I was too attached to, left me with the blank ones and the ones that turned a strange pale grey I don't recognise yet. I'll go back tomorrow. The tide won't ask my permission either way, and that's maybe the whole point.

Gallery Outreach·Inês Costa·1w

My first pieces sold in a tiny fish-market café at the edge of the old town, pinned up between the counter and the shelf of salted cod. Nothing framed the way you'd frame for a gallery, just paper and clips. A woman bought one while her coffee went cold. It meant more to me than my first proper show, I think, because nobody there had come to look at art. It just got caught in their day. These days I still do a couple of spots like that, on purpose. A surf shop, a little restaurant with its windows open to the harbour. People who'd never step into a gallery. Am I alone in this, or do some of you keep a foot in the non-gallery world too? Where was the oddest place one of your pieces ended up?

Studio Life·Inês Costa·1w

People assume cyanotype means sun, and it does, but it also means you're a hostage to the weather. I spent all spring waiting on bright days and I'm tired of it. So this week I tried something I'd put off for years: a UV lamp box, built from a cheap grow light and a sheet of glass over a wooden tray. It's not the same. The light is too even, too patient. There's no moment where the shadow shifts and you have to decide if it's a cloud passing or just your own hand in the way. Sunlight makes you commit. The lamp just sits there and waits for you to be sure, and I don't trust that. But it's Wednesday afternoon in April and Porto is grey, and I have three sheets of paper coated and nothing better to do. So. The lamp got me further than the weather did. The prints came out flat. I'm trying to be okay with that. Flat might be honest in its own way.

Rants & Vents·Inês Costa·1w

Left four cyanotypes face-up on the boardwalk by Matosinhos to dry in the sun, went off for a coffee and got talking, came back and the tide had already taken two of them. Not ruined, just gone, carried out somewhere into the Atlantic. The other two were soaked through with saltwater which honestly might have done them good. Everybody says oh no, your work. But I sat there a minute and thought, that's the process. I spend all year trying to get seawater onto paper and the sea just decides when it's ready. My grandmother used to say the sea takes what it wants, and she never meant it as a complaint. The ironic thing is the two it took were the best of the batch. Of course they were.

Gallery Outreach·Inês Costa·2w

I brought prints into a small gallery here in Porto years ago, just walking in with a tube under my arm, nervous. The owner opened them slowly and actually looked. Sat with each one for a while. I'd braced for the usual polite glance and a card. She took two. That was it. How often do you walk into a space and feel like they actually see the work, not just the CV? Have you ever had that moment where you knew they were really looking? Tell me about the one who did.

General·Inês Costa·2w

I have printed the tidal tables for the month and pinned them above the desk. Everything arranges itself around them now. Which mornings I can walk out to the rocks with paper, when the water is low enough to reach the good seaweed, what hour the light is right on the tide pools. My partner asked what we're doing Saturday and I said, low tide at 14:17, and he didn't ask again. It's fine. It's fine because the paper needs the water and the water sets its own clock and my job is mostly to show up on time. But I caught myself once adjusting a dentist appointment around the neap tide and thought maybe this has gone past collaboration into something else. Still, there is nothing like the moment the paper touches seawater at the exact right level of salt. The blue decides itself. I just hold it down.

Artwork Feedback·Inês Costa·2w

I've been developing prints in the Atlantic for two years now, and I love what the salt does to the blue during washing. But when the paper dries there's always a fine white bloom across the surface, like frost that won't lift. I've tried longer freshwater rinses after, soaking the washed print overnight, even ironing it flat. The crystals come back around the edges no matter what. I know some chemists would just tell me to stop using seawater, but I can't. The water from Matosinhos beach gives me a tone I've never matched with tap water, this deeper green-blue under the Prussian. It's not a technical accident, it's part of the piece. But the bloom makes it look unfinished, like a bad print, and I can't tell if I'm seeing it as a flaw or if it actually is one. Has anyone lived with a material that fights back like this and just accepted it as part of the work? Or is there a fix I'm not seeing?

Marketing & Social·Inês Costa·2w

Small gallery in Lisbon took interest in the cyanotypes a few months ago. They asked for the usual things, then asked how many followers I had. I said about nine hundred and they went quiet for a while. I thought that was the end of it. They wrote back last week with a date. The woman said she'd rather work with someone whose work she actually saw in person than someone with thirty thousand followers who can't hold a conversation about paper. I keep thinking about how close that came to nothing. Nine hundred of those followers are probably bots and family. The two or three collectors I have found me through a newsletter I send maybe eight times a year, mostly just photos of the prints drying and the sea that day. No strategy. I just got tired of performing for the algorithm and started doing the one thing I actually like, which is showing the work itself. Not sure this scales into advice. Just glad quiet work still has a door that opens sometimes.

Studio Life·Inês Costa·2w

I keep a pair of cotton gloves by the trays and they're so crusted with salt now they stand up on their own when I take them off. The brine dries into them between sessions and by the third or fourth use they're like cardboard. I should wash them. I won't. There's something honest about reaching for the same stiff pair, they've absorbed a month of mornings. Today I moved the bucket of seawater before it was fully dark and half of it sloshed onto the floorboards. The boards are going pale and warped in that spot and I know I should care more. I just mop it up and keep going. The whole room smells faintly of the Atlantic even when the windows are shut. Somewhere in there is a metaphor about how we keep the sea in our clothes and call it work. I'm too tired to finish it. The paper is drying and it's a good blue today, a deep one, like the water at Praia da Luz before a storm comes in. That's enough.🙂

Studio Life·Inês Costa·2w

Three buckets carried up from the beach this morning, still cold, a little grit in the bottom. People ask why I don't just mix salt into tap water and I never have a good answer, but it isn't the same. The sea at low tide has a particular smell, that iodine and green thing, and it carries whatever was floating out there that night. My prints pick up traces of it. Maybe not visible, but I know. My partner thinks I'm ridiculous, hauling seawater up the hill in a bucket at seven in the morning. He's not wrong. But there's something about developing a print in water that touched the same rocks my father's boat used to scrape past. It matters to me even if nobody else can see it. Today's batch turned out too dark. The sun came through the clouds wrong and I overexposed. I'll pour the water back into the sea when I'm done. It feels like returning the favor.

Gallery Outreach·Inês Costa·3w

Everyone tells you the first one is the hardest. Mine came through a friend of a friend who owned a small bookshop that also hung prints on the back wall. No formal thing, no submission. She just saw a pile of my blue prints drying on a table and said bring them over. That was it. I wonder how often it's like that, sideways, accidental, someone who just sees the work. Not a cold email that finally got answered. Or maybe some of you did it properly and that's the story. How did your first gallery actually come about?

Pricing·Inês Costa·3w

Sold a 50x70 cyanotype last week for €180. It was a good week, I should have been glad. Instead I sat at the kitchen table that night counting again: the paper is €14 a sheet now, up from €9 two years ago, the ferric ammonium citrate another €40 for a bottle that makes maybe thirty prints, and I toss two out of five because the light was wrong or the sea water left a tide mark I didn't want. So per finished print, before my own hours, I am at maybe €25 in materials and half my days are duds. €155 for a day of standing at the water, holding paper down, waiting. That is what it comes to when I let myself look. I have not raised a price since 2019 and I am afraid if I do people will just stop. But the arithmetic is getting louder than the shame of asking for more. I think next order I will go to €240 and see who blinks. That number has been in my head for months now, and saying it out loud here feels like the first time it is real.

General·Inês Costa·3w

Left a batch of prints in the fixer a good twenty minutes too long today. Old bottle I forgot to date. When I pulled them out the shadows had gone almost transparent, the whole blue shifted warm and muddy. I thought they were ruined. Then I left them spread on the table and came back an hour later. The light had moved, and the one I'd written off looked like fog lifting off the river. Not what I meant to make. Better in a way I didn't plan. I've been so careful for years, waiting for the clock, weighing everything twice, and the best thing I made all week came from being careless. Not sure what to do with that. Keep the bottle, maybe. Stop dating things.

Wins·Inês Costa·3w

I had a cyanotype on the drying rack for two weeks that I kept walking past and deciding was a failure. The seaweed had shifted mid-exposure, so the whole composition was off, the edges were uneven, the blue had pooled in one corner. Three times I nearly tore it up. Then the light hit it wrong one evening and I saw it. That shifted seaweed looked like the tide had moved through the paper. The pooling corner was exactly the way water sits on a rock at low tide. It's now the one print in the studio I won't sell. I keep it on the wall where the afternoon sun reaches it, just to remind myself that sometimes what I read as a mistake is the sun and the sea telling me what they had in mind all along.

Rants & Vents·Inês Costa·3w

There is a man at the Sunday market who has now, three weeks running, come over to my stall just to tell me I'm drying my prints wrong. Not buying. Not asking. Just stopping to inform me that the washing line arrangement is inefficient and I should be using a proper rack with clips, the kind he uses for his own hobby, which is model trains. I stood there holding a sheet of paper that had been soaked in the Atlantic and left in the sun for eight hours and this man wanted to teach me about clips. The thing is, I smiled and nodded. I always do. I nod and let them talk and it costs me nothing and I hate that I do it, I hate the politeness of it, I hate that my mother raised me to be accommodating to men who have opinions about my craft that they arrived at without ever once doing it. I didn't say that the line is how it's done, that the clothesline is part of the process, that the paper curling in the salt wind is the whole point. I just said "hm" and handed his change back. I have been thinking about it all week. Not the man. The nod.

Rants & Vents·Inês Costa·4w

Yesterday a man watched me hang a cyanotype to dry at the market stall and asked if I'd considered laminating them "so they'd last longer." Laminating. The Prussian blue, the paper that's been soaked in the same Atlantic water my father worked in, and he wants me to run it through a plastic machine like a restaurant menu. I told him the blue fades a little over the years and that's the point. He looked at me like I'd said I pee on them for tone. Which, to be fair, is closer to what I do, since it's seawater and sun doing half the work. I've been thinking about permanence a lot lately. We fought the sea for so long to hold things still. Some of us held the camera. Some of us just let the light decide what stays and what goes. I know which one feels more honest to me now.

Studio Life·Inês Costa·4w

Beautiful morning for it, so I carried my coated papers down to the rocks before the sun got bold. Wind gusting, spray landing on the corners of three sheets. I left them anyway. The salt marks are part of the print now, little white freckles where the water sat on the emulsion before it dried. I didn't plan that. The sea did. I keep fighting this instinct to control everything. Sun time, water temperature, how long I leave the paper under. Then a day like today reminds me the whole point is I'm not in charge. I just hold the paper down. Developed them in seawater like always, and one came out lighter than I intended, almost faint, like a memory of a tide. I think it's my favourite. I'll sell the "correct" ones and keep that one. Almost forgot to eat lunch again. The winter swims keep me honest about that, at least.🙂

General·Inês Costa·4w

There's a bucket of seawater on my studio floor that's been there since Tuesday. I keep meaning to dump it and I keep not doing it, and now it's become this small fixed point I walk around, like a pet I've forgotten to feed. Probably has something living in it by now. I don't even remember what I was going to use it for. Some experiments I had in mind about development time in colder water, and then the day got away from me like they do. It's not the first time. There's a shelf of dried prints I've never mounted because I liked them better loose, and they're starting to curl. I think half of making work is just this. Holding things long enough to decide they matter, and letting the rest quietly go bad in a bucket.

Marketing & Social·Inês Costa·4w

Sold a run of small prints on the Instagram side in three days. Little 15cm squares, cheap enough that people don't think twice. Then a collector who bought one messaged asking why I don't do a large version of the same piece, one meter wide, because that's what she'd actually hang. Thing is, the big ones don't sell through social. They need to be seen in person, in a gallery, with the light right. I can photograph a cyanotype until the sea turns grey and it still flattens into just another blue rectangle on a feed. So I keep making the small ones because they move, and the collector sits there wanting the big one I haven't printed. There's a version of this economy I don't fully understand yet. The work people say they want and the work people actually buy, they're cousins, not the same person. Anyway I'm prepping the large one this week. I think I'll keep making the smalls too. One feeds the other, even if I can't say exactly how.

Gallery Outreach·Inês Costa·4w

I've had the big interviews, the long emails, all the talk about vision and programming. But the moment that actually told me how a place works was tiny. A small gallery in Lisbon once asked me how I wanted my pieces hung, what height, what spacing. Just asked me, like I was the artist and it was my call. I knew then they were good people. Another one, bigger name, never asked anything. They just decided. And I knew, too. What's the smallest thing a gallery has done that told you everything you needed to know, for better or worse?

Gallery Outreach·Inês Costa·4w

I'll go first because mine was a little accidental. I was in a small café in Porto hanging work for the owner, just a favour, and a woman came in and watched me for a while. She ran a small gallery two streets over. She asked to see more, and six months later I had my first real show. I never once knocked on a gallery door. It fell into my lap because I was somewhere else entirely. I've always wondered if I got lucky, or if that's just how it goes, the work finds the room instead of the other way around. So how did yours happen? Did you walk in with a portfolio and ask, or did someone come to you? Which worked?

Marketing & Social·Inês Costa·1mo

I almost didn't post the quick one. Just a sheet of paper pinned to the wall, still damp, the blue not even dry, my hand shadow in the corner because I grabbed my phone and shot it before the sun moved. Three minutes, maybe. The other one, the one I arranged, waited for the right light, reshot three times, brightened the shadows in editing, that one got a dozen likes and a polite comment from my aunt. The damp one got shared around, someone wrote to ask if I'd teach a workshop, and a gallery two cities over emailed asking to see more. I keep trying to tell myself the lesson is to post more of the honest in-between moments. But the real one might be worse: I can't tell what anyone will care about, and my own judgment about my work is basically useless. I like the pretty photograph. Everyone else wanted the wet paper and the shadow of my hand in the corner.