I said yes to the March fair in Matosinhos. First time I've committed to something in two years.
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.
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The nine words taking an entire afternoon is the part I recognise. The work itself is rarely the difficult half; it is the letting it be seen that asks something different of you, and no amount of studio hours prepares you for that particular threshold.
A room above a fish market with eleven exhibitors sounds like a decent first step, honestly. Small enough that nobody is expecting a spectacle, public enough that you have actually done the thing rather than thought about doing it.
I would give one practical suggestion, and take it or leave it: label your work properly, species name and your own, and price it before you arrive rather than in the moment. It spares you the awkwardness of deciding your own worth while someone is standing in front of you holding a purse. That is the bit that undoes people at their first fair, not the hanging.
Congratulations. Send the yes and then stop thinking about it until March.
The letting it be seen, yes. That is exactly it. I can spend six hours with a sheet of paper and seawater and feel like I have done something honest, and then ten seconds of someone else looking at it undoes me.
And you are right about the labels, the species names. Half of why I print these things is that I want people to know what is actually out there, not just a blue shape on paper. I have been sewing little tags with the Latin and the place I found it. It feels more like giving something back than signing it.
The fish market is what convinced me, in the end. Wrong light, salt in the air, people coming in for cod and stopping to look at a photograph. I would rather that than a white room.