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At the conservation studio we got an 18th century prayer book in last month, water-damaged, pages fused together in a block. Someone had tried to dry it with a hairdryer at some point, which made it worse. I spent four days separating the pages with a spatula and steam, one at a time. One page came apart clean. It had been used as a bookmark, so the others hadn't printed onto it. Just a bare sheet of that old laid paper, lovely chain lines, a faint foxing in one corner. I took it home. The rules say we don't take material, but I asked, and the owner said keep it. He couldn't read the book anyway, it was his great-grandfather's in a language nobody in the family speaks anymore. I've been sitting with that page for two weeks, not cutting it. It's the first time in months I've held something I didn't want to touch. I think that's what I work with really. The moment before you decide. Tonight I cut a corner off. It felt like breaking a fast. Small thing, but there it is.

Conservation work today, a 1930s Swedish geology textbook for a library. Beautiful binding, and someone had used a page as a bookmark. Not a receipt, a folded grocery list. Bread, coffee, some kind of fish I can't read the handwriting for. I photographed it before I let it go. That tiny bit of ordinary life will outlast the textbook in my archive, I think. It's the part of this job nobody warns you about. You spend your days with other people's leftovers and you start collecting the human bits that fell between the pages. I have a drawer of them now. Postcards never sent, one pressed flower, that grocery list. Makes me think about what gets preserved and what just gets torn up and almost no one notices. The book is the treasure. The list is the actual life.

went through a box of my brother's stuff last weekend that i somehow never opened. his address book from like 2004. most of the people in it i dont know, probably dont exist anymore, one guy is just listed as "steve - plumbing." the pages are falling apart and the ink is smudged from years in a damp basement. i tore it apart and collaged the pages onto a board with some of his handwriting and one of those old gas station receipts he kept as a bookmark. it's the closest i've come to making something about him without actually saying it. the piece is ugly honestly, cluttered, and i keep going back and forth on whether to pull pages out and let it breathe. someone's gonna look at it and just see old paper. which is fine. i know what it is.

We got a 17th century book of hours in at the studio this week, brought in by a private collector. My job was mostly structural work on the binding, but at one point I had to open it flat to check the gutters, and I just stood there with the weight of it in my hands. The paper was this extraordinary handmade laid stock, still holding its chain lines after four hundred years. Someone wrote marginal notes in pencil on two pages, tiny cramped handwriting, and you wonder what they were thinking while they did it. I worked on it for maybe three hours and I have never been so careful about the weight of my own hands. It made me want to go home and tear up something worthless, honestly. Not in a bad way. Just to remember what paper is for. Anyway, the collector was pleased, which is the part that pays. But the hour of holding it was the part I'll keep.

There's a second-hand bookshop two streets from the studio and the man who runs it has started giving me a knowing look when I walk in. He doesn't ask anymore. I buy books I have zero intention of reading, mostly from the 50s and 60s, and I cut them up within a week. The really sad part is I'm a paper conservator. I spend my working days carefully saving paper, and my evenings destroying it. I've started telling myself it's a kind of balance. Today I found a 1958 Swedish nature guide with the most beautiful pale green endpapers, slightly foxed. It's already on my table. The text is going in the recycling, the paper I'll keep. I paid 20 kronor for it and I feel only slightly guilty.

A 1903 Swedish hymnbook came into the studio last week, water-damaged, pages stuck shut. Not worth saving as a book, so it was going to be discarded. I asked if I could keep the cover. Spent two evenings carefully peeling the pages apart with a bone folder. Most were ruined beyond reading. But one page, somewhere in the middle, the water had done something strange to the ink. The hymns were still legible but blurred, like they'd been written under water. I cut that one page out and it's now the best thing I've made in months. Just the page, torn edges, on white. Nobody will know what it says. That's kind of the point. The word that's half there is doing more work than the full one ever did.

Someone dropped off a first edition at the studio for a repair quote. A real first edition, 1920s, beautiful cloth. I spent forty minutes handling it and all I could think was that I wanted to tear a page out of it. Obviously I didn't, it goes back to the owner tomorrow, but that feeling, that urge, it's the first thing that's moved me in over a year. I've been stuck since last autumn. Every piece I start feels like a decision I can't make. I've got a drawer full of beginnings that are just paper I cut and didn't place. But looking at that book, something shifted. Knowing I couldn't touch it made me want to. I went home and cut up a perfectly good paperback I've read twice, and I don't even know what I'm making yet, but I started. Funny that the thing that gets you going is the thing you're not allowed to have.

Something I'm still turning over. When I first started approaching galleries again after my long pause, I came in with a physical portfolio, prints in a proper box, the way I was taught. The gallerist barely opened it. He wanted to look at my phone. I had to scroll through photos I'd taken badly in my studio with a lamp in the way. So I'm curious how the rest of you do it. What do you actually put in front of a gallery at that first real meeting? A box, a tablet, a printed book, a link you send after? I've landed on a small printed book of about fifteen works plus a QR to the rest, but I don't know if the book even matters anymore. Tell me what you hand over and whether it worked. I want to know if I'm the last one still carrying paper.

got a weird one. gallery reached out, wanted me in a group show, sent me dates, we agreed on terms. then nothing for two months. i followed up once, polite, just checking in, and got a "yes we're still planning" that felt like air. show was supposed to be last month. never heard another word. i'm not even mad, just confused. is this a thing that happens or did i somehow get cursed by a very specific gallery gremlin anyone else had a gallery initiate everything and then just vanish into the ether? did you ever find out why?

I'll go first and it's a small one but it's lived in my head for years. Walked into a place in town years ago with a folder of prints under my arm, two hares and a heron, the whole menagerie. Woman behind the desk looked at maybe the top print for four seconds, didn't lift it, and says "we're actually fully booked with printmakers for the next two years." Fully booked. Two years. For printmakers specifically. I was green enough to nearly believe her. Walked back out onto the street and it hit me about fifty yards down that she'd never once looked at the work at all, she'd just wanted me gone and that was the tidiest sentence she had to hand. Only other one that comes close is the "we'd love to keep you on file" from a fella whose "file" I'd say was the bin. So that's mine. What's the first thing a gallery ever said to you that you knew, even in the moment, was pure wind? The "we'll be in touch," the "it's not quite right for our space," the "we only show artists with representation" said by a gallery that shows nobody with representation. Give me the line and where you were standing when you heard it, that's the good bit.

There is a piece of paper on my workbench right now, a quote for a gallery in Brno. Four months of work, roughly a ton of scrap iron and about nine hundred used books. My hand wrote 22,000 euros. My head had already worked out that 9,000 would cover it and leave something. I sent the 22. Not out of bravery. I sat with the email open maybe forty minutes. What moved me was remembering 1994, a warehouse in Holešovice, a German curator asking my price and me saying a number so low he actually laughed and then paid it. I ate lentils for a month and told everyone it was fine. It was not fine. So now the rule I try to keep: when the fear says nine, write twenty-two and close the laptop. It is not math, it is a kind of discipline. If they say no, they say no, I still have my scrap and my books and nobody dies. The part I do not know yet is what happens in my stomach if they say yes. What number do you write second, after the honest one scares you?

Sister Bernice cornered me after service today. Said she saw the picture my daughter posted of the wedding quilt I just finished for my niece. "Gloria Mae, that would be so much prettier if you just followed a nice pattern out of a book. All those crooked pieces just look like you made a mistake." I stood there holding my pocketbook and just smiled. Told her my grandmother didn't own a pattern book in her life and what she made hangs in museums now. Bernice's face went tight as fresh starch. Y'all, I been quilting since I was seven years old sitting on a flour sack at my grandmother's feet. The "mistakes" are where the breath gets in. The crooked pieces are where the spirit moves through. Bless her heart though. She means well. She's just used to quilts that lay flat and quiet. Some of us like our quilts to have something to say.

Yesterday at the dump someone had thrown out a box of school textbooks, all in good shape. I took a 1962 physics book for the diagrams alone. The way they draw a lever arm, the shading on those old illustrations, it's better than half the catalogues I get from galleries. Some real care went into it. I've been cutting the plates out for collage material but now I'm not sure I want to. It's like dismantling something that was built properly. Thirty years ago I'd have torn it apart without a thought. Getting soft, or getting old, hard to tell which. Anyway the book is on my worktable now and it keeps distracting me. I keep stopping to look at the page about centrifugal force. There's a kid on a playground roundabout, very serious expression, hair blown back. He's been spinning there since 1962. I think he deserves the respect.

Small thing, but I put the deposit down for a three day pastel portrait workshop in Katowice in October. It has sat open in my browser since April. I kept telling myself I would decide after the next piece was finished, and then obviously there is always a next piece. The part that made me press send, honestly, is that the tutor uses the same toned paper I do, the grey-blue Canson, and I have wanted for a year to watch someone else handle it live instead of guessing from videos. I have no idea what the level will be like. There is a real chance I am the slowest one in the room and I will spend three days quietly panicking at the back. But I paid, and it is not refundable, so now I go. I have never taken any proper class in my life, only books and the internet and a lot of ruined sheets. If any of you have done one of these, how did you survive the first hour? I am already thinking about what to bring and it is June.

There is a box on the shelf at the studio, and it is not a working box. Inside are maybe twenty sheets I have decided are too good for anything. A 1940s Swedish school atlas with the maps printed in three faded inks. A letter from 1911 with a handwriting I will never find again. Some marbled endpaper from a book I took apart at work and could not throw away. They have been in there four years. Every so often I take one out, hold it up, decide the piece I am working on is not worthy of it, and put it back. The piece stays unfinished, the paper stays in the box. I know exactly what this is. The moment I cut into the atlas it stops being the atlas and becomes material, and material is something you can ruin. But a box of uncut paper has no failure in it. Anyway. Today I cut a strip off the corner of one of the maps, the plain ocean blue part, and glued it down. It was fine. The strip looked good, actually. The rest of the sheet is still the atlas. I am telling myself this is a reasonable compromise, but I suspect it is just a slower version of the same hoarding. Curious how many people here have a shelf of the good stuff they never touch.

Okay so this is the thing I've been circling for a while and I finally did it. I spent yesterday filming this whole thing on how to get a charcoal drawing not to lift when you're doing layers and washes. Setup, voiceover, the little tips, all of it. Edited down to like 40 seconds. It was fine. It was GOOD actually. Clean. And I sat there looking at it and hated it, because it made me look like I know what I'm doing, and I mostly do not. So I threw it out and filmed one take of me ruining the same drawing twice, saying hi to someone at the door, coming back to a corner that had smeared everywhere, and just saying "yeah I don't know why it does that either." No music. No cutaways. Put it up. It did 40k views overnight, which for me is like 10x anything I've posted. 300 comments. And the wild part is people were DMing me asking about the ACTUAL layers question, the one I couldn't answer. Everyone keeps telling you to teach teach teach, position yourself as the expert. I don't know. I think we're so sick of being sold a method by someone standing in front of a shelf of books. The thing that travels is the mess, because it's the only part nobody's faking. I'm not going to turn this into a whole strategy. I just know what I filmed first and what I filmed second and which one people watched. Anyway. Small win. Back to the drawing that's currently annoying me.

I brought a folder of twenty pieces to mine. The gallerist looked at maybe four, then asked what I was reading. We talked about books for half an hour and she took one small collage on consignment. I've never once needed the other sixteen. So what did you actually bring, and did it matter? A big portfolio, one piece, a laptop, nothing at all? I'm curious whether the pile ever does the work or if it's always something else.

Six weeks ago I deleted the app off my phone. Not the account, just the app, because I kept opening it while standing at the sink and I couldn't tell you one thing I'd seen. Came back last week, posted a detail shot of the piece I've been chewing on since March. Somewhere around the fourth layer of acrylic the paper starts lifting and you get these little blisters that look like the surface is breathing. That's what I photographed. 11 likes. Two comments, one of them from a guy who wants me to check out his print-on-demand service. Here's the part that surprised me: it didn't sting. Usually I'd post, then check my phone forty times over two days, then feel like a vending machine that nobody was putting coins in. This time I posted it, closed the app, went back to the studio and tore a page out of a 1970s phone book for the next layer. I did lose something though. A woman who'd bought a small piece in 2022 messaged asking where I'd gone. I hadn't seen it for three weeks. That one actually bothered me. So now I'm trying to figure out if the account is worth keeping at all, or if I should just have an email list of eleven people and a note on the wall. Anyone else cut back and find the math worked out better than they expected?

Been posting the installations for two years now with the location, the materials, the whole little essay in the caption. Museum tags, artist tags, the works. Everything by the book. Last month I put up a photo of one room with nothing but the date. No title, no name, no hashtags except the gallery's because they insisted. I forgot to finish the caption, honestly, phone rang. That single photo brought more DMs than the last ten proper posts combined. People asking where it was, what it was made of, if they could come see it. Questions I would have answered in the caption nobody read. Not a lesson. Probably just the algorithm being tired of my voice too. But I'm half tempted to post the next one as just a wall and let people invent the meaning. That's what I do with found objects anyway. Let them find it.

two weeks? two months? do you just let it die and assume no is no? ngl i'm the worst at this. i once waited almost four months on a "we'll circle back" before i emailed again, and the reply was basically "sorry, totally forgot you existed, we're booked through next year." could've saved both of us the time lol. i know the polite rule is "give it two weeks, then one nudge max." but i've also done the thing where you don't want to look desperate so you never follow up and you just... never hear anything. what's your number?