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I almost ruined a figure study yesterday because I couldn't leave the studio. The light was going, I knew it was going, and I kept poking at the edges anyway. Ten more minutes of that and I'd have repainted a perfectly fine passage into mud. It took me years to learn this and I still do it. There's a moment where the painting tells you it's done for the day and if you don't get up then, you pay for it the next morning with a wet rag and regret. Right now I have a rule of sorts: when I start adjusting things just to have something to do, when my hand makes a mark and I think hm, before I make it, that's the signal. Put the brush down. Walk out. Of course I had to ruin the shoulder of that figure to remember my own rule. Three hours yesterday, then an hour today scraping and restating what the light had already given me for free. Bof. Some lessons you re-learn every season.

back leg snapped clean off, someone had tried to fix it with a wood screw and made it worse. i gave the woman two dollars and she looked at me like i'd done her a favor which, i guess, i had. it's sitting on my work table under a lamp right now. i keep not drawing it. that's the whole problem lately, everything i start comes out too neat, too resolved, like i'm illustrating the thing instead of looking at it. the chair doesn't resolve. it just sits there being broken and specific, the splintered end of the leg still pale where it snapped, the screw hole gone black at the edges. i've been photographing it from underneath for a week, which is a weird angle nobody would choose, which is probably why it's working. three of them are pinned up over the sink. my friend said they look like a crime scene. she's not wrong. anyway. making work about damage is easy to say and hard to actually do without turning the damage into a prop. this chair is teaching me the difference.

Market yesterday, this woman comes over and starts pressing her thumb into every single vessel. Every. One. I counted the marks on three of them after she left. Not firm clay, they were fired pieces, so it didn't do damage, but the psychic damage was real. She looks at me and says "just making sure they're solid, you know how these things crack." Then buys nothing. Tells me she'll "come back with her friend who actually collects." I don't know why that one got to me so much. I've had people shake my pieces like they're testing avocados. Fingernails on the glaze. One guy licked a bowl once, which was weird but honestly less insulting. But the systematic poking, like I was selling her a suspicious melon, that really stayed with me all afternoon. At least she didn't say her nephew could do it. Silver linings, vale.

I noticed last week that I only actually start working once the radiator starts ticking. Same time every morning, that knocking-into-rhythm thing they do. Before that I'm just moving paper around the table, pretending. And now I've started timing things to it. Which is insane. I'm not a person who counts, I've never counted anything in my life, and suddenly I'm laying down charcoal on the off-beat because the radiator told me to. My brother used to tap his pen on everything, dining table, steering wheel, my shoulder in the car. Annoying as hell. I didn't realize until this week that I'd been working in the quiet for years and it never sat right. Anyway the piece is getting worse before it gets better, which I keep telling myself is what always happens. It's a photograph of a doorway I found in a box lot at an estate sale on Vitosha, water damage ate the top left corner, and I'm building the wash around the damage instead of over it. Half the studio floor is scraped-off grey at this point, I gave up sweeping. Not sure the radiator thing is a habit or a symptom.

Mine was "who handles the insurance while the work is on the wall?" Nobody mentions it, nobody puts it on paper, and when my first show got damaged in the install before it even opened, suddenly it was my problem. Live and learn. What's the one question you wish you'd asked before you signed with a gallery? The one that would've saved you a headache or a loss if you'd known to ask it.

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.

My husband walked into the studio this morning and said "you know that's probably giving you brain damage." I said "fine, I'll die happy smelling like a painting." He's not wrong but also, there's something about that first hit of solvent when you walk in, before you've even touched a brush. It's like the room telling you it's ready. I've tried the odorless stuff. It's not the same. It doesn't signal the same thing to your brain. Maybe that's just conditioning. Anyway I bought a new bottle of the real thing yesterday and the cashier at the art shop gave me a look like I was buying cigarettes for a child. I told her I've made it to 44, I think I'll survive. She didn't find it funny.

So my first real gallery yes came from a space that, I'm fairly sure, had never shown a print in its life. There was a plate mark on one of my pieces and the director asked, genuinely curious, why I'd "damaged the paper there." I explained intaglio for maybe ten minutes. He nodded a lot. I still said yes. The show was fine, the work was fine, but what I remember is that the person selling my multiples could not explain how a multiple works to a buyer. Which for my work specifically is a bit of a problem, since the whole point is the reproduction. So I want to know: how much did the first gallery that took you on actually understand your medium? Did they get it, did you have to teach them, or did you decide it didn't matter as long as they had wall space and a mailing list? I still go back and forth about which of those is the honest answer.

Conservation work today: a Swedish farm ledger from 1954, water damage, someone had stapled the pages together at some point and the staples had gone to rust. Standard job is to lift them out, reduce the staining, stabilize. I did the lifting. Then I sat with the rust halos for a while and couldn't bring myself to touch them. They're the only record of how the book was actually held together. Somebody in 1954 stapled those pages because they were in a hurry, and the paper has been carrying that decision for seventy years. Took them out anyway. That's the job. But I photographed every one first, which is not standard practice and I'm not sure I could explain to my supervisor why I did it. Went back to my own table after and looked at the sheet I've been building for two weeks. All clean edges. Nothing has happened to it. It's the most correct thing I've made this year and I have no feeling about it at all.

My son has put my work on a website and one order came from a lady in Delhi, so I rolled the paper in a tube and sent it by courier. She sent a photograph back. The crack is running straight through the tail of the fish. Now, in our work the fish is not decoration. Fish means fertility, means plenty, it comes in the wedding paintings with the lotus and the bamboo. To send a fish with a broken tail, what will she think of us. I know it is only the paper which is cracked, not the painting itself, but still it sat badly with me whole night. I offered to make it again, same motifs, same colours from the soot and the flowers. She is saying no, she wants it as it is, she is saying the crack is also part of the story now. I am not understanding this thinking. In our tradition we do not show the work half finished or damaged, we keep it clean for the person who is keeping it in the house. But she is a good lady and she has paid already, so I am not arguing. Maybe she is right that the paper has its own life. The old women here would not agree with her, that much I can tell you. Has anyone else sent work far by post and it came with some injury? What did you do, made it fresh or let it go as it is?

I don't fully understand this and I've stopped pretending I do. The piece was a panel, 24x30, layers of wash and charcoal over a page from my brother's address book. Gallerist shot it clean, whole, good light, hung on white. 41 likes. Nothing else. Then I snapped the back of the panel where the hanging wire had torn through the paper and I'd patched it with a strip of masking tape and a grocery receipt. Posted it sideways, no caption, bad light from the kitchen window. Two days later a woman in Portland emails asking if it's still available. She bought it. She said the tape was the part. So now I'm sitting here wondering if I should be shooting the damage instead of the work, and I hate that, because it feels like turning the thing I care about into content. But also it's the first real sale in five months. Has anyone else had this, where the piece of the piece outsells the piece. Side note, my phone camera will not focus on anything smaller than a thumbnail and I've given up trying to fix it. Whatever the Portland photo was, it was an accident.

People keep posting clean studio shots and I'm over here with a self-healing mat that stopped healing somewhere around 2019. The cuts are so deep now the blade catches in the old grooves and drags. I know it's time to replace it. I've known for a year. Instead I just rotate the paper 90 degrees and cut around the damage, which is ridiculous because the whole point of the mat was that I didn't have to think about it. There's something almost archaeological about it though. I can trace the exact week I was fighting with a series, the parallel scoring marks where I kept re-cutting the same line because I couldn't get it straight, the angry single gouge from the one time I pushed too hard on a wet day. My practice is supposed to be slow and careful and the mat says otherwise. I'll buy a new one next week. I won't throw this one out though. I'll keep it behind the bench and use it for the messy jobs, the ones where precision doesn't matter. Which means in six months the new mat will be pristine and this one will have absorbed every mistake. Honestly that feels like a fair division of labour.

I've been thinking about endings lately. I've been with the same gallery for nine years now, and it's been a good run, but I've seen more than enough colleagues walk out over things that should've been caught early. Money that never reconciled, shows that got quiet, work returned with damage nobody owned up to. I'm curious about the other side of it: what made you finally pull your work from a gallery? Was it one clear incident or a long slow build of small things? And did you regret it, or was it a relief? For me, the closest I came was over a show where the framing was done poorly without my consultation and then the gallery charged me for it. I stayed, but I learned to put framing in writing. I sometimes wonder if leaving would have been the better lesson.

Got a commission a few months ago to repair and restore this old family photo that was basically falling apart. Water damage, creases, the edges gone gray. I almost said no because I don't do restoration work, I make things. But the woman who brought it in had this look. Her grandmother in the photo. Only copy. So I did it. Carefully, slow, like the whole thing was made of ash. And somewhere in the middle of it I realized the line between repairing and making is fake. You're still just deciding what stays and what goes and what gets to be seen. She picked it up yesterday and cried in my studio. Hugged me. I'm not a hugger but I let it happen. Anyway I've been thinking about that all week. The whole time I've been collecting broken things to make art from, and the one piece I actually fixed mattered more than any of it.

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.

Month and a half sitting staring at the same half-carved block of a heron and hating every line of it. Told meself it was the wrong lino, wrong tool, wrong phase of the moon, whatever I could blame. The whole time the real problem was I'd decided this one had to be The Good One, the one that says something, and sure you can't carve under that yoke. No wonder the blade kept slipping. Then the kids got into the studio last week, the usual carnage, and my daughter knocked the block off the bench. Landed lino-side down on the concrete, gouged the corner of it. Would've wept a month ago. Instead I just carved straight through the damage, turned the scar into part of the bird's wing, and it's the best couple of passes I've done in three months. Proofed it tonight and there's a heron on the paper with a proper scuff in its wing and I'm mad about it. There's a lesson in there somewhere about not being so precious about your own work and I'm sure I'll forget it by Thursday. But tonight I'm chuffed. That's the win. And for the record the lino was grand. It was never the lino.

Third time was the charm but god it hurt. I'm working on this piece, a dog's face, big, maybe 70cm square, all in smalti, and the curve of the jaw wanted a flow I just couldn't feel at first. Cut it, laid it, stood up, looked at it. Wrong. Took it out. Next day, same thing. Wrong again. It's not even the time that gets you, it's the doubt. Is this actually wrong or am I too close to it? Do I keep pushing or trust the knot in my stomach? With mosaic especially there's no fixing it later, once it's set you're not moving it without damage. So you sit there with a hammer and a pair of tweezers and you just have to feel it before you cut. Anyway. Day after tomorrow I start the ear and I think I've got the flow now. Maybe. We'll see.

Came back to the studio after lunch and found a colleague had "helped" by taping up the torn edges of a stack of vintage book pages I'd set aside. Clear tape. On every single sheet. Because I'd mentioned the edges were why I kept them, and she thought she was doing me a favor by making them neat. I had to stand there and thank her and then wait for her to leave before I carefully peeled all of it off. Took an hour. Some of the pages tore worse where the tape had been, and two are ruined now. She's kind and she meant well and I'm still quietly furious hours later. The torn edge is the whole point. The damage is the material. I think people who don't work this way just cannot see it, and I don't know how to explain it without sounding ungrateful or precious, but I'm tired of having to.

Ok so I did this thing where I drew my own hand every night for thirty days. Same hand, same angle basically. Just to see if it would stay boring. Day 1 I wanted to throw the sketchbook across the room. My hands are ugly and I hated every line. Day 11 something shifted and I stopped trying to make it look like a hand and started trying to make it FEEL like the hand that's been doing every single thing for me. Day 30 I cried a little and I'm not even embarrassed about it. It stopped being a hand. It became all the damage and all the work and all the love I've ever done with it. Nobody tells you that drawing the same boring thing over and over turns into drawing your whole life. I'm not saying everyone should do this but I'm also not not saying it. If you try it tell me what day you break

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.