Search

I collected a few litres of seawater two weeks ago during the storm, when the sea was throwing everything at the rocks. I strain it before developing prints in it because there is always sand, sometimes a bit of weed, once a small crab leg. Kept it in glass jars on the bench. Today I used the last of it and I already miss that particular batch. Each one is different. The temperature, the salt, whatever the sea was carrying that day. It changes the blue, barely, but it changes. Now I need to wait for the next storm to get more, and I resent that the water in the tap won't do. It is a strange way to work. I know that. But the paper remembers where the water came from even if my eye can barely tell.

My partner's dog, this old lab who never runs anymore, ran after something in the shallows this morning, some gull or driftwood, I don't know, and came back wet and sandy and very proud of himself. walked straight through the studio door and across a print I'd just taken out of the sun. a perfect paw print in cyanotype blue, right across the middle where the paper was still washing. I was so angry for about ten seconds. then I looked at it and thought, that's actually the best thing that's happened in this room all week. the print was fine, just a nice photogram of seaweed. now it has a ghost dog in it. I'm framing it.

Every cyanotype I make gets developed in sun and seawater, and that is usually beautiful. This week I did a set in the dark, under my own hands, timing the exposure second by second instead of letting the sky decide. I had been avoiding it because I thought losing the sun would flatten everything. It did the opposite. Four prints of a scallop net, all of them finally the blue I keep seeing in my head and never quite got on paper, that deep cold blue the sea goes in January when nobody is in it. I have been printing for years and I still cannot explain why the same formula, the same paper, gives me a different blue depending on the day. But now I know I can hold the door shut myself when I need to. The sun is back tomorrow. I will go back to the beach with the paper and let it do what it wants. It just feels good to know I am not only waiting for weather anymore.

There's a little fleam I bought off an old carpenter at a market in Ennis maybe eight years ago, cost me a fiver, and it's still the sharpest thing in my toolkit. Handle's held together with electrical tape at this stage but I'll not part with it. Every morning I'm in the studio I run it along the edge of a gouge a couple of times and it brings the life back into it. And then I've a brand new burnisher I paid forty-odd quid for sitting in a drawer since I got it because the one I actually use is a smooth bit of bone I found on the beach in Connemara. Kid you not. Dog dug it up, I cleaned it off, and it's the perfect thing. What's the bit of kit you won't let go of because it works and that's all that matters, and what's the expensive thing you own that you barely touch? I'm not talking brushes obviously, we all have the brush we'd cry over losing. I mean the odd bits.

I taped off the horizon line on a 22x30 Arches sheet this morning and I'm now on my third strip of masking tape because the first two lifted wet paper and took a chunk of the sky with them, and the third one is somehow STILL not level. I've checked it against a ruler, held it up to the window, walked across the room and squinted, and it's leaning maybe a quarter inch to the right and I cannot unsee it. This is the whole painting. It's a beach thing, big wash, not complicated, and the one thing that has to be dead straight is the one thing I cannot get dead straight. My partner came in and said "looks straight to me" which is the single least helpful sentence in the English language, love you babe. Meanwhile the wash underneath is actually nice?? like the color is doing the thing I wanted, that soft grey-lavender where the sea meets the sky, and I'm going to ruin it with a tape line. I know I'm going to ruin it. I've already accepted it. I think part of me is stalling because once I peel that tape there's no undoing it, and I've got a little market table in three weeks and this was supposed to be one of the four pieces I'm bringing. Anyway if anyone has a trick for taping a straight edge on soaked paper that doesn't involve me buying a T-square I'm listening. Or I could just paint a boat over it, that's also an option I'm considering

every winter I tell myself I'll keep swimming through it and every winter I don't. the cold gets into my bones in a way I can't shake, and the beach is empty and grey and the sea feels like it's holding its breath, and I just... stop. I stay inside and work indoors and forget what it feels like to be fully in the water. today was the first day I went back in. the Atlantic was still cold, it's always cold here, but it was the kind of cold that welcomes you instead of punishes you. I stayed in long enough that my hands forgot they were hands. came out and dried off on the rocks and felt like myself for the first time in months. I think sometimes the hardest thing is just getting back to the thing that makes you you. whether that's the sea or the work or whatever it is. today I did it. it's not a big win to anyone else but it's everything to me.

Kid couldn't have been older than twenty. Points at a piece I'm loading out, thirty pound chunk of basalt I spent three weeks on. Asks if I found it like that. I said no, I carved it. He says yeah but did you make the rock or did you find the rock. I told him I found the rock. Four hundred million years old, I didn't make it. But I sure as hell made what's inside it. He nodded like I was humoring him and walked off. Not his fault. Nobody teaches looking anymore. They think if it didn't come out of a machine it must have washed up on a beach fully formed.

I took the prices off my shop page a few months ago. Not as a strategy, I just got tired of feeling like I was shouting numbers at people before they'd even seen the work properly. I put "please enquire" and my email. I expected silence. Instead I get these long emails now. People describing where they'd hang it, what the light is like in their kitchen at certain hours, which beach it reminds them of. Some don't buy. Some buy after three or four emails. The buying feels different when it happens, less transactional, more like they've already lived with the piece a while. The downside is real. Some people disappear the second they hear the number. I lost a sale this morning that way, a woman who'd written me three lovely messages, then just "oh, that's more than I thought" and gone. And I can't tell if I'm filtering for the right people or just making it harder for everyone. Not a tip. Just a strange thing I'm in the middle of.

I had this snapshot from a box of estate photos, four people at a beach, all of them squinting, one guy holding a cigarette like a pen. The whole left edge was water damaged and the emulsion had gone this pale tea colour. Perfect. I used it in a piece in March. Then last Tuesday I decided it was sentimental and threw it in the blue bin with the jars. Spent 40 minutes this morning in the recycling in the rain because I remembered there was a kid in the back of the shot, half cut off, holding a plastic shovel. half his face is gone now. it's just a smudge. and I need that smudge. anyway the bins were collected Wednesday. the smudge is in a landfill outside town and I'm sitting here trying to remember what half a face looked like. this is the third time I've done this to myself. I do not learn.

A man on the beach yesterday, watching me pin wet paper to a board in the wind, came over and asked if I could "fix the exposure" on a photo he'd taken of his wife. He had his phone out, already scrolling for it. I said this is not that kind of photography. He looked at the blue print, then at his screen, then back, and said oh, so it's like a filter. I didn't correct him. I just held the paper down and let the sun do its work while he walked off. But I've been turning it over all evening. Everything I do is slow and uncertain and half out of my control, and people keep wanting it to be a shortcut to something else. Nobody asks a painter if they can just crop it. Maybe it's my fault for working in public. The sea makes people think everything is easy.

Fourteen sheets of Arches, the good cold press, ordered in June and waited on for five weeks. I came home from the beach at half past six and the box was standing upright against the gate, in the rain, like it had been asked to wait there politely. The cardboard was so soft it opened with two fingers. The paper inside is not ruined exactly. That is the maddening part. It is a little wavy at the edges and the sizing has that feel to it now, slightly dull under the thumb, and I will spend the next month wondering if the blues are going to come out right or if I am going to be blaming a courier in January for something that was my own fault with an exposure. I did not shout at anyone. I unwrapped it, laid it flat under books, made tea, and then sat looking at the stack for a while feeling something I would rather not name in public. My partner said well, at least it is only paper. He is a good man and he meant it kindly and I have not spoken to him since. Anyway. If anyone knows whether damp paper can be brought back with a long press and patience, I am listening. If not, I am going to keep pressing it and pretending.

I finally worked up the courage to ask a gallery in Lisbon to take some of my cyanotypes. Twelve pieces, seaweed and net photograms, all of them made with seawater from the beach near my flat. She offered me 180 each. I said yes because I was tired and because she said it in a way that made 180 sound like a favour. They went up in her window at 520. Three sold before Christmas. I know about the standard split, I know she has rent to pay and she has to make it worth her while. I am not naive about that. What I did not expect is how quiet it made me feel, walking past that window, doing the arithmetic in my head every time. My paper costs about 9 euros a sheet and I ruin maybe one in four. The seawater I carry up from the shore in a bucket like an idiot. I don't say any of that to her because it sounds like I want pity rather than a fair price. I wrote a new number down in my notebook and I have not sent it yet. 340. Which still feels like too much and also like not enough, and I cannot tell which of those is the honest one. What I keep circling is that she never asked what I wanted for them. She just told me a number, and I took it, the way I always do. That part is mine.

I've been developing prints in the Atlantic for two years now, and I love what the salt does to the blue during washing. But when the paper dries there's always a fine white bloom across the surface, like frost that won't lift. I've tried longer freshwater rinses after, soaking the washed print overnight, even ironing it flat. The crystals come back around the edges no matter what. I know some chemists would just tell me to stop using seawater, but I can't. The water from Matosinhos beach gives me a tone I've never matched with tap water, this deeper green-blue under the Prussian. It's not a technical accident, it's part of the piece. But the bloom makes it look unfinished, like a bad print, and I can't tell if I'm seeing it as a flaw or if it actually is one. Has anyone lived with a material that fights back like this and just accepted it as part of the work? Or is there a fix I'm not seeing?

Three buckets carried up from the beach this morning, still cold, a little grit in the bottom. People ask why I don't just mix salt into tap water and I never have a good answer, but it isn't the same. The sea at low tide has a particular smell, that iodine and green thing, and it carries whatever was floating out there that night. My prints pick up traces of it. Maybe not visible, but I know. My partner thinks I'm ridiculous, hauling seawater up the hill in a bucket at seven in the morning. He's not wrong. But there's something about developing a print in water that touched the same rocks my father's boat used to scrape past. It matters to me even if nobody else can see it. Today's batch turned out too dark. The sun came through the clouds wrong and I overexposed. I'll pour the water back into the sea when I'm done. It feels like returning the favor.

For years I tagged every studio photo with the exact spot, Porto, Matosinhos, the beach name, the café where I dry the paper. Thought it helped people find me locally. And maybe it did. But a few months ago I just stopped. Posted a cyanotype of a cuttlebone I found at sunrise, no location, nothing. A woman I'd never seen walked into the studio three days later holding her phone with the post on it. She lives in the building next to mine. She said she'd walked past my door for two years and never knew what happened inside until she saw that bone and recognised the light. Made me think about how much we over-explain ourselves online trying to be findable, while the people right next to us have no idea we exist. Maybe the real local marketing is just being specific enough that someone local recognises their own morning in your work.

I've been developing cyanotypes in seawater for years now, bucket of it carried up from the beach, still cold, full of sand and whatever else. But today the tide was high and I thought, just try it. Hold the paper in the actual water, let the wave wash over it. Held it by one corner. Second wave ripped it right out of my hand. Watched it tumble in the foam for a few seconds before I went in after it, up to my thighs, January water, gasping. Got it back. Ragged at two edges, stained with something that isn't the iron solution, but fixed. It's drying now pinned to the studio wall with the tear showing. Might be the best print I've made this year. Not sure what that says about me or the work but I think I needed the reminder that I'm not really in control of any of it. The water decides.

I've been making a series on the beach at Aguda since February. Same stretch, same black rocks, same two hours before the tide turns. What changed is that I started developing the sheets in seawater I carry up from there in a plastic can instead of the tap water in my studio. The prints come out softer, less certain of their own edges. I've been calling that a flaw in my head for four months. A woman bought one on Saturday. The one where the net drags across the top corner, the one I nearly threw away twice because the exposure went too long and the blue got so deep the weed reads almost black. She said it looked like something recovered from water rather than made. I stood there and took her money and said thank you and felt weirdly close to tears. I think the win is not the sale. It's that I stopped treating the sea as contamination in my own process. For years I've been correcting it out. Anyone else here sell the piece that embarrassed them a little? I don't mean the commissioned one. The one you almost didn't put in the folder.

I printed a photogram last week, a piece of net from the beach at Foz and three strands of kelp, on a sheet of Arches I had coated a bit too thin. The exposure came out uneven in a way I can only describe as accidental, one edge dissolving into nothing, the net reading almost like smoke. I showed it to someone whose eye I trust and they said the bottom left was muddy. So I went back in and I fixed it. Re-coated, exposed eleven minutes instead of nine, washed it in seawater the same as always. It is a cleaner print. It is also dead. The thing that made it worth looking at was the part I called a mistake because someone else named it one. I keep the bad one pinned above the sink now, where it gets the steam from the kettle and has started to curl at the corner. I am not going to pretend that is a statement. It is just where the nail already was. What I actually want to ask, and I am not sure I want the answer, is how you tell the difference between a flaw you should defend and a flaw you are just sentimental about. I have been at this long enough to know the second one is real. I just cannot always see which one I am holding.

Found a box of my ex-husband's old slides at the back of a closet yesterday. We split four years ago, he'd have sworn he took everything. 200-some slides of vacations we took together, mostly boring ones. A beach in Portugal. A dumb monument somewhere in Italy. His hand holding a beer. I sat on the floor and looked at every single one. Not sad exactly. Weird. Like reading a book you know the ending to but forgot the middle. I'm not going to destroy them or make them into art or do anything meaningful. That feels like the expected move and I hate the expected move. I think I'm just going to put them back in the box and let him come get them someday, or not. There's something okay about leaving them there unexamined, too. Anyone else sitting on things they should have thrown out years ago?

I made a cyanotype yesterday of a cuttlebone I found on the beach, one of those big ones, almost the length of my hand. Laid it directly on the paper with some torn fishing net over it. Exposure was good, the sun was strong, but when I washed it the shadows all went muddy. The cuttlebone reads as a dark blob instead of having that honeycomb texture it has on the surface. I think I underwatered my chemistry. Or maybe the paper was too dry when I coated it. I've been using a cotton rag paper I'm not as familiar with and it seems to drink the emulsion differently. I've been staring at it for an hour. Part of me wants to call it a bad print and toss it. Part of me thinks there's something in the flatness, like the sea at dusk, all that detail pulled under. But I don't know if I'm just making peace with a mistake. How do you tell the difference between a flaw that works and one that's just a failure?