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The piece is a walk-through. About forty square metres of it. Galerie on the edge of Žižkov, opening in October. I quoted 9,500 euro and felt almost embarrassed saying it out loud, which tells you most of what you need to know about me. Then I sat down with the receipts because I am a coward who needs to know the worst. The steel frame: 1,400. Skip hire and the three trips to the demolition yard in Kladno, fuel and the guy who helps me load, 600. Glass, 900. The lighting I always underestimate, another 700. Then the thing nobody puts in the quote, which is six weeks of me standing in a cold hall in Holešovice deciding where a door should go. Six weeks. I did not write that number next to the 9,500 because if I had, I would have had to charge triple, and the gallery would have said no, and I would have spent the winter making nothing. So the price is a lie with good intentions. Everyone in this business knows it. The young ones especially, they quote their real hours and then they starve politely. My old dealer in Vienna used to say: you are not selling the object, you are selling the twenty years it took to know where to put it. He also died with a storage unit full of unsold work, so. I raise it to 11,500 next time. Probably. Ask me in November.

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 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.

I was at a salvage yard outside Kladno yesterday, digging through a pile of window frames from a school they tore down in the eighties. The wood still smelled of chalk dust and coal. You can't fake that. You can't buy it. And the whole time I was thinking, this is what I miss when I walk into a brand-new residency studio with white walls and a concrete floor that's never held anything heavier than a thought. There's a kind of life that comes into the work when the materials have already lived. I'm not romanticising poverty. I'm saying the objects carry something. You handle them and your hands know what to do before your head does.

Younger artist came to me for advice, said a gallery took thirty percent off his first solo. I told him that's nothing, wait till you price your own time as a pile of old radiators and broken chairs and realize you've been paying for the privilege of working. A collector here in Prague commissioned a piece for his villa. I quoted 18,000 CZK, which felt fair. Then I spent a month sourcing, cleaning, assembling. Did the math after delivery. Between material and hours I cleared maybe 120 Kč an hour. That's less than the guy who delivers my coffee. I keep doing this. I've told myself for twenty years that installation work doesn't price like a painting, that the process is part of it, that the history of the objects matters. And then I sit down with a calculator and it's 120 Kč an hour. Some things I did under the old regime I did for nothing because I had to hide them. Now I do them for nothing because I'm bad at saying a number and staying in the room while the silence stretches. The two feel different in theory. In practice, my bank account can't tell the difference.

I just finished an edition of 25 screenprints that took me four months from the first drawing to the last pull. Copper plates, inks, paper, the studio time, the proofs I rejected along the way. Sold the whole edition to a gallery for €900, which sounds fine until you do the real math and realize the materials alone were close to half that, and the gallery takes 50% on top. So I made 25 objects by hand and I think I netted something like €6 an hour. The gallery is happy. The collector is happy. I'm the only one who knows the number. The part I keep turning over is that I priced it like a print. Like the edition makes it cheap, because it's a multiple, because the original is the plate and the prints are just copies of it. But each one of those copies took my hands on it. That logic is from an old world where printmaking was a reproduction tool, not a primary medium. I keep selling work on a pricing model that was built for something printmaking no longer is, and I don't know if I'm too scared to break it or just can't figure out what the new number should be. I raised the price on the next edition by €300 and I'm already scared nobody takes it.

I spent this morning painting a section of an old workbench in my studio. The light here in Lyon, even on a cloudy day, has this particular quality that catches the grain of the wood, the worn patches where tools have rested for years. It’s a subtle thing, this interplay of light and texture, but it’s what I’m always chasing. It makes you feel the history of the object. It’s why I love oils so much; the paint itself can hold that physical sensation. Some days it feels like a battle to get it right, but when it clicks, voilà.

I have a rule I did not choose: nothing comes into the studio without a story of where it came from. This is not romantic. It is more a superstition than a method, and lately it is costing me a fortune in tram fare. There is a yard near the old docks in Holešovice. The man there, Vladimír, keeps a corner for me. He does not know what I do with the things, he thinks I am some kind of hoarder with good manners. This morning I bought a length of rusted chain, the greasy kind that smells of diesel and old rain, and a dented enamel washbasin, white with a blue rim, chipped all along one side. Twelve euros both. He threw in a bent iron hook because I bought him a coffee last time. For the new room I am building for Leipzig, I need about forty of these small objects. Forty stories. I have not found one that belongs since the washbasin. The problem with this work is not the arranging. It is the waiting for the right garbage to arrive. You cannot force it. You can only go to the yard on a Tuesday and stand in the cold and hope. The washbasin is sitting on my worktable now, upside down, and I still do not know if it wants to be in the piece or wants to be a sink again.

There is a piece of primed linen in the pocket of my painting coat, about the size of a playing card. It has been there since maybe February. When I am stuck, and I mean really stuck, three hours on an elbow that will not sit right, I take it out and I rub my thumb across the weave. That is all I do. Then I put it back and pick up the brush again, and usually the thing I was fighting is not the thing that was wrong anyway. My daughter finds this hilarious. She says it is a worry stone for a woman who has forgotten how to worry properly. She is not entirely wrong. What I like about it is that it is the one object in the studio that asks nothing of me. Every other thing in the room is a job. The palette has to be scraped, the turps jar is a disgrace, there is a tube of lead white I have been nursing along for two weeks like a sick relative. The linen scrap just sits there. It is primed, it is dry, it is fine. I mention it because I read somewhere this week that you are supposed to have a morning routine with cold water and a notebook and I thought, no, my ritual is a square of fabric in a pocket. Bof. Whatever works.

There is a scrap of old cotton sheet in my lap whenever I work, grey-brown in the middle from wiping my fingers between colours, and I have gotten weirdly attached to it. I know it is filthy. It has streaks of a Schmincke burnt umber that dried months ago and I still use it. It has a shape now, worn to one corner where I always pinch it. Washing it would fix nothing and cost me something, I think. A clean cloth feels wrong under the hand, too smooth, no memory. So it just lives folded on the corner of the easel and I will die on this hill. What is the object in your space you refuse to clean or replace, even though you know you should? Tell me I am not the only one with a cursed rag.

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?

My husband came in to bring me coffee and asked, very politely, why there is a teaspoon sitting in a jar of turpentine on my shelf. I told him it's for measuring cobalt drier and he just nodded and backed out slowly. The man has lived with me for nineteen years and still flinches at my materials. It's a good teaspoon though. Silver, from my grandmother. The handle is bent from decades of stirring. I use it for nothing else now, it would feel wrong. I think non-painters imagine we have these pristine studios, everything in its place, the way it looks in magazines. Mine smells like linseed oil and old coffee, there is dust on every surface that isn't the canvas, and the palette knife I love most lives in a jam jar with the brushes I'm too sentimental to throw away. It's all held together by habit and stubbornness. What's the most ridiculous studio object you can't part with? I suspect I'm not alone in the spoon.

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.

Third wash this morning and the mug just gets thicker. Rust-colored ring around the inside, old pigment that never fully came off, a hairline crack in the handle I keep meaning to fix and never do. Every other mug in the house is fine. I keep reaching for the broken one. I don't know when it turned into a rule. Maybe when I realized I'd rather lose an hour coaxing a brush clean than buy a new one. Same with the palette I never scrub down fully, just layer over. There's something under there I don't want to dig up. Today I'm wrecking a piece that's been too tidy for three weeks. Ripping it up, gluing it down wrong on purpose. Feels better already. Anyone else got a broken thing they won't replace? Not a sentimental object, an actual tool. One you could swap for ten bucks and won't.