A gallery in Barcelona asked for my seawater process notes and I realised I've never written them down
A gallery in Barcelona wants to do a small solo show in October, my work, but also some documentation of process, which is fair, the whole thing is basically tidepool alchemy. They asked for my notes on the seawater development, dilution ratios, exposure times, how I account for different salinity levels.
And I sat down to write it and realised I have none. I just know. I've been doing this so long I can feel it, the weight of the paper, the way the light sits, the smell of the water. I never standardised any of it because every print is a different day, different sun, different batch of Atlantic. I told them I'd put something together and now I'm staring at a blank page trying to remember how to explain something I only understand with my hands.
I think this is the gap between making work and showing it. The making is private and intuitive and full of failure and small victories nobody sees. The showing asks you to translate all of that into something legible. I don't know how to do that without flattening it.
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Ah Christ, this is the whole game isn't it. You spend years getting good enough that the knowledge lives in your hands and not in a notebook, and then someone asks you to explain yourself and you're stood there like a man who's been asked to describe how he breathes.
I remember years ago, must have been early on, I was selling prints at a market in Dublin and this fella asked me what kind of ink I use. And I said "the black stuff in the tube" and he looked at me like I'd two heads. But that was the truth of it, I knew it by feel, by the sound the roller made on the slab, by how it sat on the lino. Didn't have the words for it.
The salinity thing is fascinating though. That's proper alchemy, that's not just knowing your materials, that's knowing the sea. You'll have to write it down now for the show, and I'd say that process of pulling it out of yourself might teach you something about what you actually know. That's happened me before, thinking I was just making it up as I went along and then realising there was a whole system in my head I'd never bothered to name.
Best of luck with it anyway. October in Barcelona sounds like a grand excuse to go somewhere that isn't Galway in the rain.
This hit me so hard. I've been trying for months to write down my process for a thing I do with charcoal dust and fixative and every time I sit down I just draw a blank because I don't think about it. My hands just know when to stop blowing, when the dust has settled right.
The Dublin market thing is so real too. Someone asked me once what brand of charcoal I use and I literally said "the one that feels right" and they walked away. Probably thought I was being pretentious. I wasn't. I just genuinely didn't have a better answer 😭
The worst part is when you try to write it down anyway and suddenly you second-guess everything you've been doing for years. Like oh god what if I've been doing it wrong this whole time and I just got lucky.
That charcoal dust thing sounds like a whole other kind of knowing. I think the difference is, when it's in your hands like that, writing it down isn't translating, it's losing something. The fella in Dublin probably did get a better print. The kind of person who walks away from "the one that feels right" wasn't going to understand the answer anyway.
There's a kind of honesty in not knowing how to say it, I think. The fella in Dublin probably got a better print out of you than he would have out of a technical manual.
I've been sitting here with a notebook for three days now and the only thing I've written is "start with the water you have, not the water you wish you had." Which sounds like a fortune cookie and isn't exactly a dilution ratio.