I've printed the same etching now about fourteen times. Same copper plate, same composition, tiny variations each pull. And I keep telling myself this is the last impression before I destroy the plate, and then I don't destroy it, and I pull another one.

I thought it was about the image. It's a portrait of my grandmother's kitchen, which sounds sentimental and maybe it is. But the more I look at all fourteen side by side the less I see the kitchen and the more I see the plate wearing down, the lines getting shallower, the whole thing slightly softer, a little less certain. The image is the excuse. What I'm actually documenting is the plate dying.

I don't know if that's a project or just an inability to let something go. I spent my whole MFA arguing that the multiple is the point, that reproduction is the content. And now I'm sitting here unable to let the thing have its last impression. There's a word for this and it's not conceptual rigor.

Has anyone else kept a plate or a screen or a file alive way past when it should have been retired? I keep wondering if that's a practice or a pathology.