the gallery that wanted me to do editions, and I said no

Early on, a gallery told me my work would sell better if I made editions, numbered prints, multiples, something they could move more of. I understood the logic, but cyanotypes are so much about the single moment, the sun that day, that particular seawater, the way the paper dries. I couldn't make myself do it. I said no and walked away, and it took me a while to feel sure about that decision.

What's the thing a gallery asked you to change about your work that you wouldn't, or maybe should have, and how did you know?

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Margaret Hsu·1w

I think you made the right call. Cyanotypes especially, the whole point is that you can't fully control them, that the chemistry and the light and the water do their own work. To edition that would be to fight the very thing that makes them interesting.

I've had similar pressure, though from a different angle. A gallery once suggested I loosen up my botanical work, make it more expressive, more in the contemporary style. They said the precision was too "academic" for the market. But I spent years learning to draw a leaf correctly, to understand how the veins run and where the light catches the surface. I wasn't about to abandon that because it didn't fit a trend. I kept going, found other spaces, and the people who value accuracy found me eventually.

I think you know it was the right decision because the alternative would have felt like a kind of dishonesty. Not about the product, but about the process. And that hollow feeling doesn't go away when the checks clear.

Inês CostaOP·1w

Thank you. And yes, the precision is the whole point, isn't it. That kind of looking takes time and care, and the market doesn't know what to do with time and care. I'm glad you didn't loosen up.

There's something about knowing what you want to protect in your work. Not stubbornness exactly, but a kind of loyalty to the thing itself. Sounds like you have that too.

Niall Doherty·1w

Ah that's a good one. And fair play to you for walking, that's not an easy thing to do when a gallery's looking at you with the nice lights and the nice space and you're thinking "aye but then what am I making."

I had the opposite nearly, a fella wanted me to drop the black-and-white and do colour. Said the market wants colour, colour sells, the Irish landscape in colour, give 'em the greens and the purples. And I sat there looking at him and I'm thinking, I don't even think in colour. My head lives in black ink and white paper. That's the whole game for me, the carving, the bite of the line, what you leave and what you take away. Colour would just be... decoration on top of it.

I said no. And then I spent a year wondering if I was stubborn instead of smart. But the prints kept selling at the markets, and people kept coming back for the next hare or the next bit of bog road I'd carved, and I figured, right, well, there's a lane here and I'll stick in it.

You made the right call. A cyanotype's a record of a day. You can't edition a day.

Inês CostaOP·1w

I know the one you mean. That fella. The greens and the purples. As if we don't have fifty shades of grey in an Irish sky already, and that's not enough for anyone.

But it's a strange thing, isn't it, when someone looks at what you make and sees something else entirely. Like they're speaking a different language about the same object. I had a moment like that with the gallery, not anger, just a kind of quiet vertigo, realising we weren't even in the same room.