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Client commissioned a big piece for her new office. Paid fully upfront, lovely woman. Then she sent me a Pinterest board full of those mass-produced hexagonal thingies you buy in a box and sticks on the wall like stickers. And she said it, she actually said it, "can you make it more Instagrammable?" I laughed. Not a polite laugh, a real one. She looked shocked and then she laughed too, so I think we're fine. I explained that a Byzantine-style smalti panel takes me about three weeks on the floor, and that the whole point is you can't photograph it properly anyway. The glass catches the light different every hour, the tesserae sit slightly uneven so it shimmers, it's a thing you stand in front of. Anyway she walked away with a piece based on a local old map of the city instead of her Pinterest board, and I think she's happier for it. This whole "content is king, work for the algorithm" thing, I get it, I sell work too. But there's something sad about shaping what you make around a photo of it. The work outlives the post. That's the whole game.

So I've been doing this thing where I quote what feels scary high, trying to push past the old numbers. Last month a woman reached out about a memorial piece, wanted me to work with her dad's old survey maps, some letters, a few other things. I took a breath and said $1,200. She said "perfect" before I even finished the sentence. Which should feel great, right? Instead I spent the whole week thinking I could've said $1,800 and she would've said the same thing. I don't know where the ceiling is because I've never hit it. I'm just guessing in the dark and every time someone says yes I feel like I lost a negotiation I didn't know I was in.

had this piece sitting in my studio for months. a collage i made out of my brother's old road maps and a bunch of receipts from that year everything fell apart. i kept thinking it was a mess, too personal, no composition, just stuff glued down with no distance. almost threw it out twice. took it to a small open studio thing last weekend more to get it out of my sight than anything. put a low price on it so if nobody bought it i wouldn't care. a woman bought it and then emailed me later saying she'd lost her sister two years ago and the piece made her feel less alone in it. she said the receipts looked like proof that someone had actually lived a life, not just a name on a stone. i sat on my kitchen floor and cried for like ten minutes. not sad crying. just. something broke open that i didn't know was still sealed.

After a year and a half of watching from the sidelines they finally trusted me with an actual 17th-century map at the studio. Not just humidifying and flattening, the real thing. Tear repairs, filling a loss the size of my thumbnail, the whole slow careful dance. I've been doing conservation work since art school but always behind someone. Yesterday I sat with that map for six hours and my hands did not shake once. That sounds like a small thing but it isn't. The paper is so thin you can see the light through it and there's something about touching something that old with your bare fingers, knowing you're the one responsible for it being there tomorrow. My coworker said the map smelled like tobacco and old ships. It doesn't. It smells like nothing at all, which is what three hundred years of being properly kept does to paper. I think that's the part I love. Nothingness that was fought for.

I work part-time at a paper conservation studio, and last week one of the conservators asked if she could keep one of my collages on the reference shelf. Not to display. To study how the layers sit together, how the adhesives hold up over time. It's the kindest thing anyone's said about my work in a while, because she meant it as a materials question, not a compliment. It was a small piece, mostly a torn map fragment and a bit of old ledger paper. The sort of thing that takes me three weeks and looks almost accidental. She's seen a hundred years of paper fail, so her keeping it around says something about how it's made that I actually trust more than a gallery wall. I walked home in the drizzle feeling steadier than I have in months. Small win, but it's mine.

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.

Everyone talks about the printed side of old paper. The book pages, the maps, the letters. But half my time is spent thinking about the back. When I find a sheet I like, the first thing I do is flip it over and look at what the blank side has absorbed over the years. Coffee ring, foxing, a crease from being folded in someone's pocket. Sometimes the blank side tells more of the story than the print does. The conservator in me says these are flaws. The collage person says they're the whole point. Today I spent an hour deciding whether to keep a faint blue pencil mark on the back of a 1940s ledger page. Kept it. It's the only thing on that page that feels alive.

Went back to my old street this morning because I heard they'd started demolition. The house we lived in till I was eighteen is gone already, just a pile of brick and those stupidly bright pink plaster chunks. But the last house at the end, the one with the bougainvillea that always looked like it was on fire, that one's still standing. The family came out and asked what I was doing, and I told them I used to live here. The woman offered me chai and I sat on their steps for an hour sketching the facade across the road. My own childhood home, and I'm drawing it from someone else's porch. The really strange part is how much I remembered wrong. The balcony I was so sure faced the main road, it faces the side lane. The window I thought was mine, wasn't even in our flat. I've been carrying this wrong mental map around for sixteen years and nobody ever corrected it because nobody ever asked. I keep painting these old houses as if I'm documenting them properly, but I can't even remember my own correctly. Maybe that's what the whole project actually is. A record of how unreliable I am. Anyway the chai was good. That house has maybe two weeks left.

still thinking about the art teacher who told 12 year old me i was "wasting good paper" because i drew on it without sketching first. like i was supposed to map out every line in pencil before i was allowed to touch the good stuff. i sat in the back and drew anyway because i didn't know how to do it her way and i still don't!!! some people never let that voice go. took me fifteen years and a therapist to realize the voice telling me to slow down, erase, redo, was never mine. it was hers. i make fast and messy on purpose now. if it burns i burn it and i start again. that's the whole point. paper is cheap. your nerve isn't.

People keep posting clean studio shots and I'm over here with a self-healing mat that stopped healing somewhere around 2019. The cuts are so deep now the blade catches in the old grooves and drags. I know it's time to replace it. I've known for a year. Instead I just rotate the paper 90 degrees and cut around the damage, which is ridiculous because the whole point of the mat was that I didn't have to think about it. There's something almost archaeological about it though. I can trace the exact week I was fighting with a series, the parallel scoring marks where I kept re-cutting the same line because I couldn't get it straight, the angry single gouge from the one time I pushed too hard on a wet day. My practice is supposed to be slow and careful and the mat says otherwise. I'll buy a new one next week. I won't throw this one out though. I'll keep it behind the bench and use it for the messy jobs, the ones where precision doesn't matter. Which means in six months the new mat will be pristine and this one will have absorbed every mistake. Honestly that feels like a fair division of labour.

Every piece of limestone I carve ends up the same way. I pick the block, map out the form, rough it in right, and then about halfway through I start chasing the vein. There's always this one line of darker stone running through it and I keep trying to work with it, shape around it, make it mean something. It never works. The piece ends up looking like I fought the material instead of the material and me agreeing on something. I did it again this week on a 200 pound piece of Indiana limestone and I knew better the whole time. I told my old mentor about it once. He just looked at me and said the vein isn't the problem, you are. I've been chewing on that for fifteen years and I still don't know if he meant I should stop trying to feature it or stop pretending I can ignore it. Maybe it's the same thing. Anyone else got a habit that keeps repeating even though you know exactly what you're doing when you do it?