Search

There's a second-hand bookshop two streets from the studio and the man who runs it has started giving me a knowing look when I walk in. He doesn't ask anymore. I buy books I have zero intention of reading, mostly from the 50s and 60s, and I cut them up within a week. The really sad part is I'm a paper conservator. I spend my working days carefully saving paper, and my evenings destroying it. I've started telling myself it's a kind of balance. Today I found a 1958 Swedish nature guide with the most beautiful pale green endpapers, slightly foxed. It's already on my table. The text is going in the recycling, the paper I'll keep. I paid 20 kronor for it and I feel only slightly guilty.

Working part-time at the paper conservation studio has ruined me for hoarding. People bring in these things, old letters, theatre programs from the 30s, family photos where the emulsion is lifting, and I get to touch them, gently, and then they go back to the owner. Nothing stays. Meanwhile my own collage stack is mostly junk mail and book pages I've torn out of things nobody wanted anyway. Nothing precious. Which is probably why I can actually cut into it. There was one piece today though. A 1942 ration card, some address in Malmö, pencil handwriting on the back. I sat with it longer than I should have. It went back in its sleeve and off to the client. Fine. But that's the thing that'll be in my head while I work tonight, not any of my own paper.

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.

A small collage went to a collector in Utrecht last month. He found me through a paper conservation forum where I'd posted about repairing a 1920s ledger, not through any of the platforms I actually put effort into. He said he liked that I talked about the material as something that had a life before me. I've had an Instagram account for six years. It has brought me one sale that I know of. The forum post took twenty minutes and cost nothing. I'm not going to delete anything. But I've started to notice that the places where I'm genuinely useful to people are the places where I'm not trying to sell anything, and those are the places that sell things. Which is annoying because you can't really manufacture that on purpose. I spent two hours last week trimming a batch of edges for a show in Malmö. That part doesn't go anywhere. It just is the work.

Been humidifying the same page for four days. Blotter, Gore-Tex, weights, the whole slow ritual. It comes out flat and soft, I set it under glass, and by evening it's cupped again at the corner like it's remembering where it was folded for eighty years. I know the answer. More time. Less heat. Patience I don't have this week. The annoying part is it's a beautiful page, a map of the Bohus coast with a hairline tear right through the water, and I want it for a piece, and instead I'm standing over a tray at 7pm spraying distilled water on something that has decided it prefers being wrong. Conservators keep telling me paper has a memory. Mine is holding a grudge.

Not staring at it in the good way. The way where I take it out, lay it on the table, put it back in the folder. It's a probate ledger, hand ruled, dated 1794. Watermarked. The paper is gorgeous and completely unusable, because it came to us as a bound item and someone on staff decided it was too far gone to repair, so it's been deaccessioned and I was allowed to take the blank leaves. Here's the problem. Every blank leaf has a bit of someone's actual life bleeding into the gutter. A column of numbers. A name, half a name. Something pressed in 1796 that's now a brown stain shaped like a leaf. My whole practice is torn edges and silence. I cut the pieces. That's the point. But I sat there with the scalpel on Tuesday and just could not put the blade through a man's handwriting from 1794 to make a nice grey rectangle for a gallery wall. So now it's Thursday and there's a stack of 18th century paper on my table doing nothing, and I'm starting to suspect the paper is winning. Not looking for advice. Just wanted to say it out loud somewhere that isn't my own head.

I spent yesterday evening peeling a piece of 1950s bookplate off a backing board and it just tore. Not a clean lift, the whole inner corner shredded. My own mistake, wrong adhesive when I mounted it two years ago, and now the paper is gone with it. At conservation we'd call it a lesson in reversibility. At home it's just me being annoyed at myself. There's a strange thing though. That torn corner, that little loss, it's actually the most alive part of the collage now. The rest is too neat. I've been staring at it all morning trying to decide if I'm going to fix it or leave it as the best piece of the whole thing.

The conservation studio has proper benches. Long ones, good light, nothing on them that shouldn't be. At home I have a table too, a decent one. And yet every single time I start a piece I end up on the floor with the paper spread around me like I'm doing something illegal. It's the only way I can see the whole sheet at once without standing back. Standing back means walking. Walking means the arrangement disturbs itself in my head. On the floor I can reach everything and the dog thinks we're doing something together. The problem is my back. Forty minutes in and I'm folded like a deck chair. I've started setting a timer, not for the work, just to remind myself that humans have spines. It goes off and I ignore it maybe half the time. Today I tore a 1930s Swedish hymnbook page into six strips and got one of them right. One. The other five are in the jar with the rest of the mistakes. Anyway. If anyone has solved the floor problem without actually giving up the floor, I'd listen.

A colleague at the conservation studio cleared out a cupboard last week and let me take a box of old Swedish ledger paper, maybe a hundred sheets, 1930s, the good rag stuff with that faint blue rule running through it. I carried it home on the tram and felt quite pleased with myself. Two sheets survived the first pass. Two, out of a hundred. The rest went back in the box. The blue lines fight everything I put near them, and the paper is too even, too polite, it wants to be a background and never a thing in itself. I keep falling for paper I will never use. The box is still under the table. What I kept was an endpaper with a brown water stain shaped roughly like Denmark, and a sheet where someone had pressed a flower in 1961 and left a ghost of it. Those two are already good as they are. Anything I add will have to earn it. I have done this for years and I still cannot tell in advance which sheets will hold anything. It is only ever after I have torn into them.

A woman bought one of the small ones in November, 24x30, six pieces of torn paper and a lot of nothing. I asked 3,200 kronor. She paid without blinking. That is the part that stays with me. Not that she paid it. That it took her four seconds. I priced it by counting hours, which is the wrong way to price anything I make, because the hours are mostly me standing at the window deciding not to glue something down. Comes to maybe 700 an hour if I only count the cutting. If I count the thinking it is a joke. So now I have a number that works and I am afraid of it. Not afraid to say it again, afraid that it was luck, that the next person will look at the same size and hear the number and go quiet. And I have already caught myself, twice, drafting a lower figure for a piece that is actually harder. A 40x50 with hand-torn edges from a 1940s Swedish reader. I sat with the email open for an hour. The conservation work pays by the hour and nobody argues about it. Paper is paper. The art is the only thing I do where the price has to come out of me. Anyway. I raised the small ones to 3,600 this month. Nothing has sold since. I am not sorry yet but it has only been three weeks.

I keep a small pot of wheat starch paste going. Not the same batch, obviously, but the same pot, same jar, same setting on the hotplate, and I realised this week it has outlasted two of the jobs I've had since I bought it. It sits at about 60 degrees and never quite simmers. If it simmers it goes stringy and then it's useless for thin paper, so I watch it the way other people watch a kettle. The conservation studio uses a proper paste, cooked and sieved and chilled, and I bring some home sometimes. It's better paste. But the pot at home is what I actually work with, and I've started to think the difference is not the paste at all, it's the fact that I know exactly how it behaves at 60 degrees and my hands have stopped needing to check. Anyway. I had a sheet of 1940s Swedish schoolbook paper go translucent on me because I was too generous with it. It's drying under weight now. I'll know tomorrow whether I've ruined it.

My studio is basically a stack of things I've kept because the paper was good. A 1937 Swedish school atlas, a box of receipt stubs from a locksmith in Mölndal who closed in the eighties, a lot of endpapers from books too far gone to save at the conservation studio. Today I was working on a small piece, maybe 20 by 25 cm, mostly empty. I had a scrap of what I thought was a nice aged ledger paper pinned to the wall for two weeks, waiting for the right spot. Turned it over. It's the back of an envelope. Someone's address in pencil, half rubbed out. The good side is the envelope interior, which has a waxy coating, and it will not take paste. It just sits there on top of the glue like it's refusing. Two weeks of looking at it. I should have checked in the first minute. I keep things because the paper is good and then I don't look at the back, because looking at the back is admitting I might have been fooled by the front. I've kept it anyway. It's on the wall, wrong side out now. I don't have a plan for it.

I stopped tagging my exact materials for a while now and the engagement went up. Not a lot, but noticeable. "Paper and ink" instead of "torn pages from a 1952 Swedish grammar book, conservation-grade paste." I think the specificity was read as fussy. Which is ironic because the fuss is the whole point of what I do. But I'm also aware that I'm measuring my work by a metric I don't actually respect. So I changed the tags back and now I'm just watching it drop again. Fine. I'd rather be understood by the seven people who get it than perform for the ones scrolling past.

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.

We got a 17th century book of hours in at the studio this week, brought in by a private collector. My job was mostly structural work on the binding, but at one point I had to open it flat to check the gutters, and I just stood there with the weight of it in my hands. The paper was this extraordinary handmade laid stock, still holding its chain lines after four hundred years. Someone wrote marginal notes in pencil on two pages, tiny cramped handwriting, and you wonder what they were thinking while they did it. I worked on it for maybe three hours and I have never been so careful about the weight of my own hands. It made me want to go home and tear up something worthless, honestly. Not in a bad way. Just to remember what paper is for. Anyway, the collector was pleased, which is the part that pays. But the hour of holding it was the part I'll keep.

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.

I had a small show open at a library in Majorna in March, six pieces, and I did the sensible thing for once: no announcements, no countdown, no "link in bio". Posted nothing at all for the six weeks around it. Partly stubbornness, partly I was in the conservation studio four days a week and just did not have it in me. Result: eleven people came. Two of them were staff. One bought a small piece for 1,200 kronor, which for me is a good sale, not a great one. The thing that did anything was a photo I took on the table by accident, half the work cropped out, just a torn edge and a bit of old ledger paper with the light across it. Put it up at nine in the evening with no caption. Four people asked about the paper. One of them is now coming to the studio in May. I have no idea what that means and I am not going to build a method out of it. What I keep turning over is that the photo was worse as a photo and better as a thing to look at. The proper shots, the ones my partner took with the good lens, did nothing. Flat, correct, dead. I think people could tell there was a person behind the bad one. Not advice. I am not going to start posting bad photos on purpose, that would be a tactic and it would show.

At the conservation studio we got an 18th century prayer book in last month, water-damaged, pages fused together in a block. Someone had tried to dry it with a hairdryer at some point, which made it worse. I spent four days separating the pages with a spatula and steam, one at a time. One page came apart clean. It had been used as a bookmark, so the others hadn't printed onto it. Just a bare sheet of that old laid paper, lovely chain lines, a faint foxing in one corner. I took it home. The rules say we don't take material, but I asked, and the owner said keep it. He couldn't read the book anyway, it was his great-grandfather's in a language nobody in the family speaks anymore. I've been sitting with that page for two weeks, not cutting it. It's the first time in months I've held something I didn't want to touch. I think that's what I work with really. The moment before you decide. Tonight I cut a corner off. It felt like breaking a fast. Small thing, but there it is.

Conservation work today: a Swedish farm ledger from 1954, water damage, someone had stapled the pages together at some point and the staples had gone to rust. Standard job is to lift them out, reduce the staining, stabilize. I did the lifting. Then I sat with the rust halos for a while and couldn't bring myself to touch them. They're the only record of how the book was actually held together. Somebody in 1954 stapled those pages because they were in a hurry, and the paper has been carrying that decision for seventy years. Took them out anyway. That's the job. But I photographed every one first, which is not standard practice and I'm not sure I could explain to my supervisor why I did it. Went back to my own table after and looked at the sheet I've been building for two weeks. All clean edges. Nothing has happened to it. It's the most correct thing I've made this year and I have no feeling about it at all.