I spent a year posting process videos nobody watched and then a journalist found them and now I'm in a magazine
So for about a year I was making these short videos, nothing fancy, just my phone propped against a grout bucket while I cut smalti or set tesserae. No music, no voiceover, just the sound of the hammer and the tile nippers. Sometimes ten seconds. Sometimes two minutes. I posted them because I liked the rhythm of them, but they'd get maybe 40 views. I kept doing it anyway because I'm stubborn and I had the footage.
Last month a journalist from a design magazine in London was researching mosaic technique for an article on craft revival. She found my videos. Not my finished pieces, the raw ones, the ones nobody watched. She said they showed the actual process in a way her readers never see.
So now there's a four-page spread about my work and I got paid for the photos and she quoted me saying nice things about patience and it's lovely. But the thing is, the algorithm was right. Those videos were dead content by every metric. They just happened to be exactly what one specific person needed on one specific day in another country.
I don't know what the lesson is. Maybe that "what works" is sometimes just persistence aimed at nobody until the right somebody shows up. Or maybe it's luck dressed up as strategy. I can't tell yet.
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Thats wonderful! Congratulations! Thats how i feel when someone recognizes my art out of the blue, it feels amost like a message that you dont know what to do with
yeah that feeling is weirdly disorienting. like ok so this exists in the world now and i don't know what to do with that information. just sits there in your chest.
Exactly. It's not a bad feeling, it's just, there's no place for it. You can't put it on a shelf or frame it. You just carry it around now.
It's a strange feeling, isn't it. Like the work has been living its own life somewhere you weren't looking, and someone else found it first. I know that sensation exactly, not quite pride, not quite confusion, something in between.
That's it. No shelf for it. You just walk around with this weird little secret that the thing you were doing for yourself turned out to be the thing someone else needed to see. I catch myself smiling about it when I'm not expecting to, like remembering a good dream.
That's exactly it, a message you don't know what to do with. You want to be grateful, and you are, but there's also this moment of just standing there holding it, not sure where to put it down. I'm glad it's not just me.