Eleven years of pull after pull, and I still have never once gotten a clean first proof of anything. Not once.

Anyway. I've been working on a series of five plates where I acid the same drawing at different times, so the "same" image comes out at five different depths. Trying to make a set that only exists as a set, so you can't own the one, you have to take all five or none. Meant to be about the impossibility of the original, obviously.

Today I pulled the second state and the line went thin and grey, the way it does when you have lost your bite and you're too far past caring to fix it. Normally it goes in the bin. But I keep a folder now, plain grey, called PROVE BRUTTE, and it is the only place in the studio where I learn anything. Good proofs teach you nothing, they just confirm you already knew what you were doing, which is a very small pleasure. The bad ones tell you what your hand actually does when you are not watching it.

The thing is I have never shown anyone that folder. Not a curator, not my partner, not the person I shared a studio with for two years. So the archive of my real thinking sits in a drawer nobody opens, and the tidy resolved things go on the wall. I am aware this is a metaphor I keep building on purpose and refusing to live in.

I don't know what to do with it. Some of those proofs are better as objects than the editions were. I think I might frame the ugliest one, the grey one from this morning, and hang it in the good room.