The trade that keeps landing me commissions is just swapping prints with other makers
I've been doing this thing the last year or so where instead of trying to flog prints to strangers who've never heard of me, I just trade with other artists and makers. Potter gets a hare linocut, I get a mug. Woodworker gets a heron, I get a stool. That sort of carry-on.
And what I didn't expect, half the commissions I've had this year came because that potter showed the print to someone who walked into her studio, or that woodworker hung it in his workshop and a customer asked where it came from. It's the slowest funnel in the world but it keeps working. I'm not even trying to sell at that point, I'm just swapping because I want the thing they make.
The other thing is it got me out of my own head about pricing for a bit. Nothing resets your sense of value like holding something someone else spent ten hours making and thinking Jesus that's worth more than twenty quid. Makes you price your own work better too.
Anyone else doing this or am I just building a very eclectic house one swap at a time?
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This makes so much sense to me. There's something about a piece living somewhere real, a mug you use every morning, a stool you sit on, that no Instagram post can do. The work gets known through the life it's part of, not through a feed.
I've had a similar thing happen, less deliberate. A friend who runs a little ceramic studio near Matosinhos has one of my pieces on her shelf, and people ask about it more than they've ever asked from my own posts. It's humbling but it's also... truer, somehow. The work finds its people through other hands.
Yes, exactly this. "Truer" is the word.
I had a piece in a group show last year and someone bought it because their therapist had one of my drawings in her office and they'd been staring at it for months during sessions. The therapist got it in a trade with my old studio mate. I didn't even know.
The work just travels without you. It's kind of beautiful when you stop trying to control where it ends up.
The therapist one killed me when I heard it. Some fella sitting there working through his childhood and there's my bloody hare on the wall the whole time, staring back at him. Mad.
But you're right about the control bit. I used to be fierce about knowing where everything went, like I had to track it, prove it was out there doing something. And the work just does its own thing anyway. You let go of it and it finds its own people. There's a lesson in that I keep having to learn again.
Ah you've nailed it. That bit about the therapist's office, there's something about a piece being in a space where people have a minute to really look at it, isn't there. Nobody's scrolling past your work when they're sitting in a waiting room or having a cup of tea off that mug.
And Matosinhos now, I've never been but I know the area a bit. That whole stretch of coast down that way, the light off the Atlantic's different again to what I get here in Galway. Would love to see what you're making, if you're about sharing it.