What did you say yes to that you should have said no to?
Every gallery story here is about getting in. Mine is about the one I should have turned down.
Years ago a space in a city I won't name offered me a room. Big, clean, good light, and absolutely wrong for what I make. I said yes before they finished the sentence. Spent four months filling it with things that did not belong there, and the show was fine. Just fine. The kind of fine that costs you something you cannot name at the time.
So. What is the yes you regret? The show, the gallery, the "opportunity" that was really just a favor to someone else. Tell me I am not the only one who has done this.
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Ah you're far from the only one. I said yes to a "pop-up" in a shopping centre one Christmas, three weeks, glass front, lads dragging buggies past me all day wondering was I doing tattoos. I make linocut hares, like. Not a tattoo. But the rent was cheap and they asked nice and I heard myself saying "grand, sure why not" before the brain caught up.
The thing that got me wasn't the money, it was that I started carving for the footfall. Softer shapes, smaller prints, things that'd "read" through a window to someone walking by at speed. Four months of that and I sat down at the bench one night and couldn't remember what my own hand felt like when nobody was watching. That's the cost you're on about. The fine one.
The way I've come to see it, an opportunity that asks you to be less yourself isn't an opportunity, it's just a room with good light. Easier said when the rent's due though, and I'd probably say yes again if the timing was bad enough. What did you do with the work after? Mine's still in a drawer and I can't look at it.
The bench at night, yes. That is where it gets you. Not in the room, not with the buggies, but later when it is quiet and you notice your own hand has learned a new habit you did not teach it. Carving for the window is a real thing. I have built for the sightline more than once and every time something in the work went a little dead.
Smaller prints, softer shapes. You were not selling out, you were just being looked at by people who were not looking. It is a different animal. Did the hares come back to themselves after, or did it take a while to trust the edge again?