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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.

My old drill died last week. Twenty years of screwing together salvaged frames, brackets, whatever held a room up. I bought the same model, same brand, but it has a different sound. Higher pitch. The old one grumbled, this one whines. And I realized the sound was in my head too. Every time I drilled that old one I knew exactly where the resistance was, when to ease off, how it felt before wood split. The new one tells me nothing. I'm working blind on something I've done a thousand times. It's not about the drill. It's that the small tools become part of you and you don't notice until one dies. The same thing happens with materials. A room of found objects I've built five times, then suddenly the objects are different, the grammar is gone, and I'm a beginner again. Middle age is just losing your tools one at a time and pretending it doesn't matter. Anyway. The hinge post in here reminded me. We blame the hinge, but it was never the hinge.

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.

The steel door into my space on the edge of Žižkov is a joke. Industrial, from some factory that got sold for apartments, and it needs a shoulder to get moving. Every morning I tell myself I'll oil the hinge and every morning I shove it instead. I think I've decided the struggle is part of starting. Like the work can't begin until I've earned entry. Which is nonsense, but nonsense that gets me through the threshold. Today I found a child's wooden shoe last in a box of scrap I bought off a man in Kolín. Someone wore that thing maybe 1940s, the heel worn smooth on one side. It doesn't fit anything I'm building. I put it on the shelf anyway because some objects you just let be what they were. Not everything has to become art. That took me fifty years to learn and I'm still not sure I believe it.

Found it this morning in the bottom of a jar of old brass fittings I'd forgotten I own. M6, 40mm, flat head. I'd already ordered four more online, of course. That's the rule: the thing turns up the day after you give up and buy replacements. I spent twenty minutes just holding it. It's a good screw. I think half my practice is this, the archaeology of my own mess. I keep everything because I learned under the old system where nothing was available and you hoarded what you could. Now I have a workshop full of objects waiting to be remembered. Sometimes I feel like the curator of a museum of my own indecision.

Found a red clay pot of my grandmother's this week, hiding in the back of a cupboard my cousin was clearing out. Nothing special to look at, glazed cracks, the kind of humble object every Greek kitchen had. But she used to say that pot was the only thing she carried with her when they left the village in '43. Fed four kids out of it on the road. I cut pieces of it and set them into a kitchen splashback I'm doing for a client. Her pot, chipped into that wall. I didn't ask anyone, just did it. My cousin cried when she saw the photo. I told her it's the best use a pot ever got after seventy years of sitting. Half of me wonders if that's sentimental nonsense, tiling someone's dead grandmother into a stranger's kitchen. The other half doesn't care. That pot raised a family. It's earned its place somewhere that gets used.

I have this one pair of embroidery scissors, very small, very old, I found them in my yiayia's sewing box after she died, probably from the 50s. I don't embroider. I don't sew. But they live on my workbench and I use them for exactly one thing: cutting the cotton thread I tie around bundles of smalti so they don't slide apart when I carry them from the shelf to the floor. Nothing else. If I need to cut string or paper or anything, I use something else. These scissors just do this one job. It's stupid. But there's something satisfying about having a tool that only exists for a single tiny task. Like a little ritual object. Anyone else have a tool like that, something absurdly specific that you keep around for one thing only?

ok so i don't know why i did this but i got obsessed with this stupid little ceramic mug my partner got me from a thrift store, it's this weird pale yellow-green with a chip on the handle, and i just kept painting it every morning with my coffee. same mug, same light, same angle, same rough setup on the windowsill. fourteen paintings of the exact same object. and it's genuinely taught me more about how watercolor handles light than anything i did in school??? like day three i finally stopped trying to "draw" the mug and started just trying to catch the way the shadow fell across the table. day seven i realized i'd been painting the background too warm every single time. day eleven i just sat there for twenty minutes before i even touched a brush because the light was doing something i'd never noticed before. i don't know if i'll ever show them to anyone, most of them are not good, lol, but i think i found my new morning ritual. it's like warming up before you run. except with coffee and a mug that's probably not gonna survive another move. anyone else have a weird little exercise they do that nobody asked for?