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found a box of my parents' old divorce papers in my storage unit last weekend. thirty years of legal filings, bank statements from accounts that don't exist anymore, letters between lawyers. almost threw it out. instead i spent three days tearing it up and collaging it onto a panel with charcoal over the top. felt gross at first, like i was violating something. then i realized those papers were already dead. the marriage was dead, the money long gone. i'm just making something honest out of the paperwork of it all. nobody's seen it yet. not sure i want anyone to, actually. but it's the most alive i've felt in the studio in months. there's something about using the actual artifacts instead of just alluding to them. does anyone else keep the raw material of their own mess and turn it into work? or is that just me being morbid

he saw a photo of one of my pieces somewhere online and wanted to "check in." nine years together and he genuinely thinks my work is about him now. like the last four years of me learning how to make anything at all was a footnote to our marriage. i didn't say it but i wanted to tell him the piece he saw is made from my brother's old shirts and some torn map of a town he never visited. it's not about him. none of it has ever been about him. the nerve of him calling it "our story." i just said oh, glad you're well, and hung up. then i sat in the studio for an hour not making anything because i was too busy being annoyed. classic.

Found a box in the back of the closet today. Ex's stuff, the stuff I couldn't give to Goodwill after we split. Not sentimental stuff either, a cracked lamp he fixed twice, a stack of his old field guides, some cassette tapes. Four years and I still can't bring myself to open it, let alone get rid of it. Weird part is I don't miss him. The marriage was done long before the divorce was. But that box is the one thing I won't touch. I make work about objects carrying weight and here I am with a literal box of dead weight I'm too chicken to deal with. Maybe it becomes a piece someday. Maybe that's the only way I let myself look at it.

Found a little screwdriver in my coat pocket today. The kind that folds open, cheap steel, worn wooden handle. I have owned it since I was maybe twenty three. It has been through two marriages, one divorce, the fall of a regime, and about four hundred pieces of work. I do not remember ever buying it. It just exists, like a cat that moved in and never left. I think the thing I keep is not the tool. It is the fact that I opened and closed it ten thousand times without once noticing. You want proof you were alive somewhere, it is not in the exhibitions. It is in the things your hand did automatically while your head was somewhere else. Tomorrow it will go back in the same pocket and I will lose it again for six months. Fine. That is our arrangement.

Right, so I'm two weeks into a block of a heron standing in the shallows, all that hatchwork around the water done, maybe three hours from being ready to proof, and the lino tears. Clean down the middle, right through the bird's chest. Not a crack or a chip. A catastrophic divorce. I stood there holding the two halves for a good minute. Then I laughed, because what else are you going to do. The dog looked up at me to see if I was alright and decided I wasn't worth the effort, went back to sleep. Two weeks. And the stuff I was using was perfectly good lino too, not cheap grey stuff, it just decided it was done with me. The funny thing is, I kept both halves. I'm fairly sure there's a way to mount them and pull them as two pieces, but honestly I might just frame the block itself the way it broke, it's sort of brutal and lovely. Or use the heron's head half for a smaller print. Give it a chance to redeem itself. Anyway. If anyone's got a method for rescuing a torn block, I'm all ears, but I'll warn you I've already talked myself into it being art. The missus says I'm a hoarder with a printing press. She's not wrong.

I keep a biscuit tin of nails and screws on the studio shelf. Old Czech tins, the kind my mother stored buttons in. Every time I move studios, sweep the floor, take something apart, the loose fasteners go in the tin. I have never once bought a nail in my adult life. That tin has followed me through two divorces, four studio moves, one flood. Somehow it is the most permanent thing I own. There is a lesson in there about what actually accumulates when you are not paying attention, and it is not the things you planned. Today I needed a specific size of wood screw and of course it was not in the tin. It never is. You find the screw you needed three months ago, never the one you need now. That seems to be the whole system.

Took me forty-five years and a divorce to say it out loud but here we are: if someone hands me a theme and a deadline, my brain turns off like a switch. I stare at the wall. I cut and reset the same piece of stone six times. I produce something technically fine that I don't care about. Meanwhile the thing I do for myself, last month it was a portrait of my neighbor's cat made entirely from broken roofing tile I found in a skip, I finished it in a week and a half and it's probably the best thing I've made all year. I keep saying yes to calls and group shows because that's what you're supposed to do, right? Get your work out there. Network. But I think I'm done pretending I function that way. I'll take the solo slow route even if nobody sees it for a while.

I have a box of my ex-husband's old tax returns. Not for any sentimental reason. Just feels wrong to toss someone's financial records in the bin, even if they're from 2012. They sit in the bottom of my supply closet next to a bag of dried-out markers. Also have a broken ceramic rabbit my mom gave me when I got divorced. She meant well. The ear fell off in 2020. I glued it back on badly and now it stares at me from the shelf like a little insult. What's the thing in your studio that has no business being there but you can't get rid of?

Still using the same tube of Sennelier ultramarine I bought in Paris in 2003. The crimp at the end is almost completely folded over now, every week I squeeze it a little flatter and think this is the last canvas, and then there's always a little more. I've moved twice with that tube. It survived a marriage and a divorce and a second one. Probably thirty canvases have a bit of it in them somewhere. I keep meaning to buy a fresh one. And I don't, because somewhere in there I've decided the old one is the better colour, which is nonsense, it's the same pigment, same batch probably. But you know, the tube itself has the right temperature now. A new one would feel cold. My wife thinks this is sentimentality. It isn't. It's superstition, which is a different thing entirely.

The cordless drill gave up this morning, mid-screw, some little mounting bracket that has no business being dramatic. Twenty-two years, that thing. Two batteries, the chuck replaced twice, survived the fire in the Karlin studio and the divorce where I got custody of it along with the good ladder. Now it just sits there, warm, refusing. The new one is cordless, lighter, quieter, and honestly I already don't trust it. It hums too politely. The old one roared like something offended. I keep the dead one on the shelf. Not for art. It's a witness. I think that's what a studio is, half the time. A graveyard of tools that outlasted their jobs, and then in a room somewhere someone walks through the whole thing and calls it a statement. It's a drill. It's a drill that worked for twenty-two years. I'm going to drink my coffee and look at the bracket I didn't finish mounting and feel old in the way that's actually fine.

There is a plywood crate in the corner of my current space. It has followed me across three studios and one divorce. Inside: every exhibition catalogue from 1989 to about 1997, the years I was showing regularly. Nobody will ever look at them again. There is no archive interested. But I cannot throw them out because somewhere in there is the proof that I was doing something, and I know how stupid that sounds. The younger ones don't have this. They have hard drives and cloud storage and nothing exists physically anymore. I'm not sure which is worse, a crate of dead paper or a folder nobody will ever open. I told myself last week: the next time I move, the crate goes. But the studio got flooded in spring and my first thought was the crate, before the drawings. So I am not moving anywhere, and the crate stays, and I am fine with being this predictable.

i have a roll of masking tape that's been in my studio since before i got divorced. it's yellowed, the edges are curly, half the time it doesn't even stick right. and i keep reaching for it instead of buying a new roll because it was there when i was figuring out how to make the first piece that actually felt like mine. i know this is stupid. i know tape is like three dollars. but that roll has been through a lot of bad work and a few good ones and i can't bring myself to throw it out. anyone else got a piece of gear that's objectively useless but you're keeping it anyway