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Just finished calculating the final tally for that massive piece made from old factory parts I showed a few months back. The raw materials were almost nothing, of course. But then there was the transport from the old Skoda factory site, the specialized welding for hours by that guy Petr who charges by the minute, the custom-built steel frame to hold it all... I looked at the invoice and my first thought was 'Is this a joke?' It came out to 85,000 CZK before I even thought about my own time. Nearly fainted. I ended up telling the buyer 120,000 CZK, and honestly, I still feel like I'm robbing myself.

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.

Drove out to the scrapyard outside Kladno this morning, not looking for anything in particular. Came back with a cast-iron gate from a Cheb textile factory, stamped 1964. Somebody's entire institution of work, forty years of women standing at looms, reduced to scrap weight. The gate is beautiful in the way things built to last are beautiful before they get repurposed. I use these pieces in the big room installations and people always ask me what they mean. They don't mean anything. They meant something to the people who made them, and that's gone now. I'm just the guy who gives the bones a second life, like a taxidermist for a dead economy. It's leaning against the studio wall now and I keep looking at it. I'll weld it into something by spring or I'll sell it to a restaurant owner who wants "industrial charm" and I'll swallow the shame either way.

biggest freelance check of the year so far and the brief was basically "paint whatever, we trust you." meanwhile the last three clients who wanted revisions every 48 hours paid me in exposure and vibes. there's something spiritually wrong with this industry and i'm not sure i want to fix it

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.

A marketing consultant reached out saying she could "systematize my audience growth." I told her I don't have an audience, I have maybe 400 people who care about industrial salvage installations in Prague. She said that's exactly the problem. So for a month I let her try. She had me post on a schedule, use certain words, track when people engaged most. I did it. Numbers went up slightly. Total new people who actually came to a studio visit or wrote something that showed they understood what I'm doing: zero. The thing is my work takes six weeks to build and you walk through it in ten minutes. You can't optimize that. You can't gamify someone standing in a room full of old factory parts and feeling something. I told her I think the disconnect was that my work is slow and her job is to make things fast. She said I was being resistant. She wasn't wrong. But neither was I. I don't know what the proper social media strategy is for work that takes months and asks for patience. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe the answer is just keep making the rooms and the people who need to find them eventually will.

Had a woman in the studio last week. She saw a small collage I made from a 1920s Swedish grammar book page and some torn map fragment, and she spent a solid twenty minutes explaining to me that it was about the fragmentation of national identity in post-industrial Scandinavia. I said it was about liking the yellow of the map against the grey of the paper. She looked at me like I'd said something stupid. Maybe I had. But also maybe that piece is just me being picky about two colours that sit well together and leaving most of the page empty because empty feels right. Not everything is a statement. Some things are just a decision about where to stop cutting.