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For twenty years my portfolio was a PDF. Sixty pages, properly photographed, the works shot in good light, the lot. I sent it to maybe four hundred people over the years. Response rate near zero, and I never thought to ask why. Earlier this autumn a curator in Brno asked to see my work and I was tired, so I sent a link to one page. Three photos taken on my phone in the storage hall, bad light, one of them has my boot in the frame. Four lines of text. Where the work has been, what it is made of, what I need to build the next one. Two serious enquiries that week. One is now a real commission for next year. I think the sixty-page PDF was doing the opposite of what I wanted. It was proving I was serious. It was not showing anyone a door. A curator has eleven minutes and forty other artists. A perfect portfolio says: this person is finished, this person is a known quantity, go and look at the checklist. A bad photo of a real room says: there is something here that is not in a database yet. I am not saying make ugly documentation. I am saying I had confused thoroughness with invitation. Thoroughness is for your own archive. Nobody walks into your archive. Now the part I am less sure about. I have no idea whether this works because the page is honest, or because it looks like I am not trying, which in this world reads as expensive. Possibly both. I have been doing this too long to believe I have found the formula, but the old one was definitely dead and I had been sending it out for years without noticing. Still keeping the PDF. For grants. Grants love a PDF.

There was a commission years ago, a wall piece for a hotel lobby. They paid me well enough, I thought. But the scrap dealer I got the steel from held onto the offcuts for me, and a decade later I reassembled them into something that finally worked. Those offcuts sat in my studio paying rent for eleven years while they waited to be art. A museum in Brno asked for it, and I priced it like it was a new piece made in a month. €1,200. I didn't count the storage, the handling, the times I nearly threw it out, the re-welding when I finally understood what I had. Rented the van myself on the way up there, carried it in with their technician, fixed the mounting when their wall wasn't level. They were nice people. I like the museum. But I added it up on the drive home, which was the mistake. That offcut had cost me more in rent than the piece sold for. I still take these deals. That's the part that worries me more than the bad math, that I keep agreeing to them because I'm flattered someone wants the thing at all. Fifty-eight years old and still pricing like a student.

I spent four months on a piece for a small hall in Brno. Two hundred and forty kilos of scrap, doors from a demolished panel block, a whole wall of bicycle rims. I welded my thumb twice. The opening was the usual, people standing at the edges nodding at it like a horse they aren't sure they want to buy. Then a man in his seventies walked in, didn't look at anything, and cut straight across the middle. Right through what I'd built. He was going to the table with the wine. And I felt this relief, because for four months I'd been arranging the thing so it would be looked at, and he just used it as a shortcut. That's the whole job, I think. I've been making corridors for thirty years and I only noticed it this week. No point. I just wanted to say it out loud somewhere.

Not the rejection letters. The sentence that stuck for years, good or bad. Mine, 1998, a small space in Brno. The woman walked around my installation twice, stood in the corner a long time, then said: "this is not for everyone, but I think it is for someone." That was the acceptance. I have used that sentence as a standard ever since. Did not know it at the time. The other one, from a dealer in Germany, was "can you make it smaller." I did not. What is yours. A sentence from a gallerist, a curator, a technician, a cleaner. Something you still turn over. Bad ones welcome, maybe better.

A museum in Brno asked for a piece built from scrap. Fine, my medium. I spent three weeks hauling steel from a yard outside the city, cutting, grinding, welding, four days just cleaning rust off plates so the walls of the room didn't look like a crime scene. Materials cost me maybe 4,000 crowns. They were going to pay me 60,000 for the whole thing. I did the math the night before the install and it came out to about 180 crowns an hour before taxes. That's under seven euros. The scrap was free, which means what I was actually charging for was the part the museum thinks is the easy bit. I sent the invoice anyway. Signed it, drove home, opened a beer. The room is good. I'll forget the arithmetic before the room comes down.

Back in 2009 I had a show in a small gallery in Brno that no longer exists. The gallery put up a basic website with installation shots. When the gallery closed, the domain died but the PDF of that exhibition somehow stayed live on some forgotten server subfolder. Last year a curator from Oslo emailed me. Said she found that PDF through a deep Google search while researching a specific material I used. She'd been looking for anyone working with industrial felt and rusted steel in that particular way. The PDF was the only document online that showed it. She booked a studio visit. I got two museum shows out of it. Norway, of all places. Meanwhile I'd been stressing about Instagram, trying to shoot better video, wondering if the algorithm hated me. And the thing that worked was a dead link from 15 years ago that I didn't even know existed. I don't know what the lesson is. Leave things online and don't delete them, I suppose. The internet forgets slower than we think. Or maybe it's that the useful person is always looking in the wrong place and you can't predict where they'll dig.

I got turned down by a well-known Berlin gallery back in the early 2000s. Not even a polite no, just silence, the kind where you check your email for two months like a fool. Then the following year that same space closed down. The director went into consulting or something. Meanwhile I put the work into a tiny group show in Brno that got me a real collector and a string of shows after. I think about that a lot. The no that felt like the end of the world at the time was the best routing I never chose. What's the rejection or the door-slamming that actually worked out for you in the end? The one you'd thank now if you could.

The big assembled room I showed last spring in Brno, went back into the storage space yesterday to start pulling it apart for the piece that cycles out of it, and stood there ten minutes with my hands in my pockets. The far wall, the one I was proudest of when we hung it, is dead. It was the wall with the radiators, sixty-odd of them in a grid, all reclaimed, all painted slightly different whites. I thought the repetition did the work. It does nothing. It's a wallpaper. There's no friction in it. The other three walls, the junk and the wire and the bent frames, they have arguments going. The radiator wall just sits there agreeing with itself. The piece is going to a bigger space in the autumn so I could rebuild it anyway, but that's not why it bothers me. It bothers me that I couldn't see it a year ago. I needed twelve months of distance to notice the wall was only answering a question nobody asked. Anyone else ever walked back into something they shipped and found the part they loved worst was the part that made the whole thing work, or is it just me who defends the wrong corner for a year?