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First group show I did, years ago, the owner hung my figure study between a hunting scene with dogs and a very large seascape with a lighthouse. I stood there for an hour trying to understand the logic. He said, "you will sell better next to the lighthouse." I did not sell. So, tell me the truth: what did a gallery hang you beside, and did it help or hurt? I still don't know if placement is a real strategy or just a wall that needed filling, and I'd like to hear from someone who has been hung well. Or badly. Both are useful. Bof, I'll say it plainly. I think it matters more than galleries admit.

Three years now and I still can't get rid of his jackets. They hang in the studio closet like a weird audience. Sometimes I reach for one when I'm cold and forget it's not mine. The sleeves are too short on me, which should remind me it's his, but it doesn't. It just feels like a sweater that shrank. I've cut up so much of his other stuff for pieces. The flannel went into a collage last spring. His old T-shirts became rags and I caught myself feeling guilty about it, which is stupid, that's what they're for. But the jackets stay. I don't know what that's about. Maybe I just like having them there. They're ugly. That brown corduroy one is genuinely terrible. Anyway. The studio's a mess today, paint everywhere, and the jackets are the only clean thing in the room.

I took on a commission last year that I was genuinely unsure about. A woman brought me a box of broken tile from her old family bathroom, the renovation had just torn it out, and asked if I could make something from it. Not a mosaic of something, she said. Just... the tile itself, made into something that feels like it means something. I said yes because I liked her face and I needed the work. Then I sat with five kilos of beige ceramic for three months not knowing what to do. Tried arranging it as patterns, tried mixing it with other material, nothing worked. It just looked like broken bathroom tile. In the end I cut every single piece smaller, reduced it all to tiny irregular shards, almost like coarse sand, and set it into a very simple circle, graded from pale to dark, like a kind of eclipse or a coin. No image. Just the material, transformed by being reduced and rebuilt. Took weeks of just cutting and placing, cutting and placing. She picked it up yesterday and cried. Said it looked like her grandmother's bathroom floor, which wasn't even something I knew about. I don't know if I'll ever do that again, but I'm glad I did it once. Something about letting the material lead instead of imposing a design. Hard to describe. But it worked.

I don't do a lot of gates. Forge work, small stuff, brackets and railings. But a neighbor down the road wanted a gate for the side of his house and asked what I'd charge. I said 4,800 and thought that was fair money. Steel was 900. That's the cut sheet, tube and flat bar, one delivery. Then I stood in the shop for six days. Cutting, fitting, tacking, squaring, correcting the square because the frame pulled, welding it out, grinding, wire brushing, two coats of primer and a topcoat, letting it cure, then hauling it over in the truck and hanging it with two of us because it's a heavy bastard and the posts weren't plumb to begin with. Six days at the bench plus a day of finishing and a half day hanging, and I was in it about 2,600 in materials and consumables. So call it 2,200 for eight days of my life before anybody takes a bite. That's under 300 a day for work that will still be standing when I'm not. I knew the number was soft when I said it out loud. I said it anyway because he's a neighbor and because I'm still figuring out what to charge for the things I don't do often. The work I do every week I can price in my sleep. The work I do twice a year, I guess, and I guess low. It's hung. It's straight. He's happy. I learned what a gate costs me, and it's not 4,800.

I had a gallery ask me to deliver the work, install it myself, and pick it up after the show, all at my own cost. No mention of covering transport, no help with hanging. Just "you bring it, you hang it, you take it back." I said no and walked. What's the most they've asked you to cover that felt less like a partnership and more like you were their supplier?

I walked into a group show once and found a chunk of my mosaic installed on a wall that got direct afternoon sun. Full glare, you couldn't see the color at all, just a flat blinding sheet. I stood there wondering if they'd even looked at it before hanging it. The curator meant well, it just never crossed anyone's mind. I said something, politely, and the fix was a curtain in five minutes. But it taught me to ask about light when a space takes my work. With mosaic, half the piece is how the light hits the smalti, you hang it wrong and it's dead. What's the worst way you've seen your work shown in a gallery? Bad light, wrong height, hung next to something that ate it whole? Tell me I'm not the only one who's had to fix it myself.

Six years ago I did a course at the Fondation where we had to do a copy of a Dutch still life using period grounds. I used zinc white in the underpainting because the leader swore by it, and I remember thinking the surface looked beautiful, milky, soft. I've kept that painting hanging in my studio ever since. I looked at it this morning and the whole thing has gone chalky. Collagen-like cracks running through the greys, the whites turned to plaster. The craquelure is everywhere, and the softness I admired was the zinc pulling the paint film apart slowly, year after year. It's not drying, it's delaminating. The thing that gets me is I knew better. I teach this. I tell students never to use zinc in anything but the final touches, if at all, because it stays plastic forever and never forms a decent film. And I kept a bad decision alive for six years on my own wall because it had looked convincing at the start. I'm going to scrape it down and do it again on a good lead white ground. Actually I feel lighter about it. It was a good lesson to have hanging in front of me all this time, failing in slow motion.

ok so back in february a small gallery reached out to me on instagram, loved my work, wanted to talk about a show. i was SO hyped, first real gallery interest since going full-time. we had a zoom, they said they'd send a proposal "next week." then nothing for a month. i followed up, they apologized, said they were restructuring. another month. then "we're still interested, hang tight." and i just... kept hanging?? for six months?? and finally i just said look i need an answer and they were like oh we actually paused programming for the year. and i know a lot of you are gonna say i should've called it way sooner, and you're probably right. but also i feel like there's this weird pressure to be chill and patient and not seem desperate, and galleries know that. so i'm asking, have you ever been strung along like this by a gallery? how long did you wait before you walked? and honestly what's the line between being professionally patient and letting them waste your time??

Mine took 50 percent on the first sale, and I signed without blinking because someone had finally offered to hang the work. What I did mind was smaller and I did not see it coming: they re-matted two of my pieces to fit their own frames and did not think to mention it until I walked in on the opening. The commission I had braced for. The mats I did not. So, what did your first gallery take off you, or change, or quietly decide on your behalf? The money, the framing, the title of the show, the hanging order. I would like to know whether I am the only one who found the small liberties harder to forgive than the big percentage.

Yesterday a man watched me hang a cyanotype to dry at the market stall and asked if I'd considered laminating them "so they'd last longer." Laminating. The Prussian blue, the paper that's been soaked in the same Atlantic water my father worked in, and he wants me to run it through a plastic machine like a restaurant menu. I told him the blue fades a little over the years and that's the point. He looked at me like I'd said I pee on them for tone. Which, to be fair, is closer to what I do, since it's seawater and sun doing half the work. I've been thinking about permanence a lot lately. We fought the sea for so long to hold things still. Some of us held the camera. Some of us just let the light decide what stays and what goes. I know which one feels more honest to me now.

sold a mixed-media piece last week to some guy who saw it in the window of the cafe where i sometimes hang work. he was enthusiastic, which i'm not used to, so i was already suspicious. anyway he messages me yesterday saying he loves it but could i just "tighten up" the torn edges on the bottom right. says they look "accidental." they're supposed to look accidental. that's the whole point. i told him the piece is finished and he can return it if he wants. he got huffy like i was being difficult on purpose. i am being difficult on purpose. but also it's done. you bought a thing that exists. you don't get to edit it after.

I had my first open studio thing this weekend, just me, my little apartment studio, some snacks I burned slightly, and like 30 people who actually showed up which still feels insane. And this woman came in, didn't say much, walked around for a while looking at everything. She kept coming back to this one painting I almost didn't hang because I thought it was too quiet, just a corner of my kitchen window with the light hitting the sill at that golden hour angle. I'd painted it like six times trying to catch it right. She came up to me at the end and said it reminded her of her grandmother's kitchen in Poland and she couldn't stop staring at it. And then she bought it. And then she cried a little when she was writing the check, said she hadn't seen her grandmother in eight years. I didn't know what to do with that honestly. I just stood there holding the cash like a complete idiot. My partner had to nudge me to say thank you properly haha. I think I forget sometimes that the paintings leave me and go live in other people's lives and mean things I'll never fully know. That's kind of terrifying and lovely at the same time. Anyway the burned snacks were a hit somehow so I guess I'll keep burning them on purpose.

I've been painting for twenty-five years and I've never once seen my own work properly hung in a real gallery. I'm always on the other side of the canvas, a meter away, smelling the linseed. Today the small gallery in Croix-Rousse put up three of my interiors for a group show and I walked in and just stood there. The light they'd chosen, the height, the space around the frames. It looked like someone else painted them. Better than I remembered. I think we don't know our own paintings until a stranger hangs them. Anyway. I was at the vernissage pretending to be calm and a woman I don't know stood in front of the one of the kitchen at dusk and didn't move for a long time. She wasn't reading the label. That's the whole thing, honestly. That's the moment you do it for.

So a gallery in my city reached out. They saw my work online. Want me in a group show this spring. This is literally the thing I've been wanting for years and instead of being excited I've spent the last week spiraling. I keep thinking about how I've never been in a studio program, never had a crit, never had anyone teach me how to hang a show or talk to a collector. I don't have a CV. I don't have an artist statement that doesn't sound like a journal entry. And now I'm supposed to show up next to people who did all that the right way. I painted through the anxiety last night and honestly the piece that came out might be the best thing I've made all year. So maybe the fraud feeling is the point? Like if you're not scared you're not pushing it far enough? Anyone else get the thing they wanted and immediately want to run from it? Or maybe I'm just overthinking this.

i did the thing where you make an edition because a friend said "prints are passive income." 40 giclee prints of a piece i actually like, cost me $180 plus shipping tubes, and i've sold three. two of those were to people i know. here's the part that bugs me. the original sold fast, $450, to a woman who wanted it for a hallway she's repainting. the print, same image, $45, sat. i think it's because a print is honest about being a copy and nobody wants to hang a copy of a painting, even a good one. or maybe my print is just bad, that's also possible. anyway there's a stack of 37 in my closet and one of them is under the lamp with the cracked base to stop it wobbling. i'm not mad about it exactly. it's more that i can't tell if i failed at marketing or failed at having the right product. those feel like different failures and i don't know which one i'm looking at. curious if anyone here has made an edition that actually moved, and what was different about it.

Small thing, and I'm still buzzing off it. I did a commission for a couple over in Oranmore, a St Brigid's cross with the rushes done as a big bold black shape over a grey sky, cut in lino, edition of 30. Not my usual hare, but they asked and I liked the idea, the cross is a fierce strong graphic when you strip it back. It took me three weeks and I redid the whole block once because the first one the arms were too thin and it just looked like a starfish having a bad day. Anyway, I dropped it in this morning. Man opens the door, takes the print, holds it out at arm's length, and says nothing for a solid ten seconds. I'm standing there dying, thinking right, he hates it, do I offer to take it back. Then he goes "hang on till I get herself" and walks off down the hall and I can hear him calling her like there's a fire. She came out and got genuinely teary. Said her granny had one on the wall of the kitchen in Clifden and she'd forgotten the shape of it. And here's the bit that got me. I know it's just a bit of lino and a bad back from the press. But for about a minute this morning it didn't feel like work at all. Sitting here with the tea gone cold, still grinning at nothing like an eejit.

Ok so I want to hear the actual stories, not the polished "I just kept making work and eventually..." version. Mine: there's a café near me with really good light and I basically went in every week and eventually the owner let me hang six pieces. Sold two. One to the barista. I have never felt more famous than that week haha. It was NOT a gallery, it was a café, and it counted. So how did your first one actually happen? Cold email? Walked in with a portfolio? Friend of a friend? Messaged a curator at 1am (no judgement, I have almost done this)? Tell me yours, I want the real version. Also if you've never landed one yet, what's the thing you're most scared to try? I'll tell you if I'd do it.

They asked for 150 words. I've written maybe eleven versions and deleted all of them. It's the jacket. My brother's. It's been hanging in the corner of the studio for six years because I couldn't put it in a closet and I couldn't throw it out, and the piece is what happens when you stop pretending it's going to move somewhere else. I know that's not what they want. They want the version with "explores themes of" in it. And I get it, the text matters, people read it before they look. But every time I write it down the object gets smaller. Like I'm explaining a joke. So now I'm sitting here at 11pm trying to find a way to say the true thing without handing over the whole thing. Not sure that's possible. Maybe the statement is just supposed to be a little bit of a lie so the work stays intact. Anyone else write theirs months after the piece is done, or is that just me being stubborn about it.

I do a market in Galway most Saturdays, small stall, prints in a rack and a box of seconds, and I've been half hearted about it lately because the online thing is eating the hours and giving back less every month. Last Saturday a woman picked up one of the hare prints and said "I have this already, well I don't, my sister does, it's in her chipper in Kinvara." I'd sold that one two years ago at a different market to a fella who bought it for cash and never gave me a name. Never saw it again. Turns out it's been hanging above the fryers in a chipper in Kinvara for two years, in the steam and the grease, and it's still up there and people are looking at it while they wait for chips. Anyway she bought two more off me, one for herself and one for the sister, because the sister's one was "gone a bit grey at the edges." So the steam did eventually get it. I don't know what the lesson is, if there is one. I spent a fair chunk of last week building a carousel of studio shots with a caption about process and it got 12 likes. A chipper wall in Kinvara sold two prints. I'm not going to go chasing chipper walls, I'm just noting it. Somewhere in the middle of that there's the actual answer to this whole carry on and I keep missing it.

Something I have never resolved properly: at the beginning I walked in with a folder and asked the person at the front desk whether the gallery director was in. Twice. Both times no, of course. The third time I got ten minutes with someone who was not the director and who was kind enough to tell me to come back when I had a body of work and not a folder. I still think there is a right answer to this and I never found it. So, when you went in cold, who did you ask for? The director by name, whoever was at the desk, the person hanging the show, nobody at all and you just looked at the work for an hour first? Genuinely want to know what worked, because I suspect the answer is different now than it was for me.