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Not a growth tactic, more a survival measure. For years I answered everything the day it arrived, and the day it arrived was usually a morning I had planned to work. One email about a group show in Antwerp and the whole morning gone, because after answering I am no longer in the painting, I am in the correspondence about the painting. So since March I answer on Tuesdays. Everything. Piles up, I read them Tuesday morning with coffee, answer in one go, and the rest of the week the studio door is shut properly. What surprised me: the fairs and the institutions do not care. They wait a week. Two commercial galleries dropped me off their list of people to ask for things, which honestly I count as a gain. One collector I have known for eleven years wrote back after nine days and said it was a relief, he had assumed he was the only one drowning. The thing it did not fix: the actual selling. Being unavailable makes you slightly more interesting to some people and simply absent to others, and the others are the ones with the money in the room. I have not solved that and I am not pretending the calendar solved it for me. But I have had eight uninterrupted weeks in the studio since March, which is more than the whole of last year, and the work is better for it. That is the whole of my marketing strategy at the moment. A closed door on Wednesdays.

got a cold email from a PR agency yesterday. they found my work through a show I did last spring and wanted to "help me tell my story." i was almost flattered until i read the whole thing. they specifically called out the piece i made from my brother's old work shirts and said i should "lean into the grief aesthetic" because it's "very on trend right now." also suggested i do a tiktok series about "what losing someone taught me about creativity." i stared at my screen for like five minutes. then i deleted it. i know they're just doing their job and this is how marketing works now but something about having your actual life turned into a content strategy made my skin crawl. i'm not a brand. i'm not a grief influencer. i'm just someone who makes things because i don't know what else to do with the weight. anyone else getting these? the ones that make you feel like a product instead of a person?

Had a market stall at the weekend and the crowd-pleaser wasn't the big linen-backed heron print I was proud of. It was the small rough one of the drowned village, the one I carved off an old photo of my granda's aunt's house that's under the water now in Connemara. Three people bought it and every single one of them stood there while I told them the story. The fella who actually pulled cash out forked over for the smaller, rougher one once he heard the house had a name and a wake in it before the flood. So I've started putting a four-line story under every print on the site instead of "giclee print, acid free, signed." Not the poem, not the essay, just the bones of it. The hare one is now "she sat in the field behind the house the winter I stopped drinking and I thought we were the same animal." Early days but the page views are up and somebody actually messaged asking about the woman in the story. It's not a strategy, it's just me finally telling people why I carved the bloody thing instead of acting like the image should do all the work. Reckon the marketing crowd would call it storytelling. I call it being arsed to talk to people, which is the one thing I'm actually good at. Anyone else ever sold the story and not the picture? Or am I just talking to myself here.

Bit of an odd one. Last month I got tired of the whole posting schedule thing and did something silly instead. I had 200 small prints made of two sketches, the Russell Market facade and one of those tiled-roof houses off Modi Road, and I dropped a stack at the chai stall near my building, the one I sit at every morning. Stall owner said keep them, charge 150 each, he'd keep 30. Sold 11 in three weeks. One of those people tracked me down and now wants a full watercolour of her grandmother's house in Basavanagudi before it goes for redevelopment. I know it doesn't scale, I know it's not a "strategy." But I have been posting faithfully for a year and a half and the algorithm has given me roughly nothing. A paper stack on a tea counter did more in three weeks than 240 posts. Anyway. Curious whether anyone else has gone back to the physical, offline thing or if I'm just lucky with my chai uncle.

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.

Not going to pretend I have any idea what I'm doing on here. My daughter set this account up and I'm trying. But here's what actually worked for me this year. There's a stone yard about 40 minutes from the studio. Big operation, commercial stuff, countertops and monuments. They've got a pile out back of broken slabs, cutoffs, chunks with veins running the wrong way. Stuff they'd pay to haul off. I went in person three times over two months. Brought coffee once. Just asked if I could pick through it. They finally said fine, just sign the waiver. I've pulled maybe 800 pounds of good marble and granite out of there so far. Paid nothing. And the crazy part is, a local contractor saw me loading pieces into my truck one day and asked what I was doing. That turned into a commission. Then the yard guys tell their customers about me sometimes when someone wants something custom. Cost me about 12 bucks in gas and some patience. Way better return than the Instagram ads my daughter set up for me. Those got me nothing but spam accounts telling me my work is "mesmerizing." Anyway. If you work with physical materials, find the local supplier's scrap pile. Bring coffee. Ask nice. That's the whole strategy.