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Took me three weeks to get back into the studio proper after Christmas. You know the way, kids back to school, chest infection going round, the whole place damp and cold and the ink was like treacle. Kept finding reasons to just tidy the bench instead of cutting. Anyway last night I finally pulled a proof of a block I started in November. Big heron, neck curved down, standing in that shallow water you get on the Corrib at low tide. First proof was rank, cut too deep in the wing feathers, lost the line. Had the whole thing sitting there mocking me. Pulled a second proof at half eleven last night with a different black and a lighter touch on the roller. And the missus came down to see what I was at, coffee in hand, looked at it drying on the rack, and said "that's grand now, that's a nice one." For her that's the highest praise you'll get. No fuss. Took herself back up to bed. Sometimes you just need to get through the bad version to find the good one. And a "that's grand" off someone who's seen every failed print you've ever made. That'll do.

I've been carving this one hare since February. Not a new hare, the same hare, the one I keep coming back to like a dog to a gate. Every time I pull a proof the eye is the thing that ruins it. Too round and it looks like a sheep. Too small and the whole head goes dead, like there's nothing home behind it. Anyway. Tuesday night, half eleven, kids in bed, Herself asleep, I'm in the shed with the radio on low and I take one more sliver off the corner of the pupil with a 1mm gouge. Barely anything. Could have been a bit of dust for all the size of it. Pulled the proof and stood there looking at it for a good minute. There he was. Looking back at me. Fourteen proofs to get a hare to look at you. I know that sounds like nothing. But it's the first time in about five months I've looked at my own work and not wanted to put it through the window. The rest of the block is still rough as a ditch, I'll be at it another fortnight, and I don't care. Anyone else had one of those where it's a stupid small thing that flips the whole piece? Not the big dramatic breakthrough, just a gouge stroke the width of a hair.

Eleven years of pull after pull, and I still have never once gotten a clean first proof of anything. Not once. Anyway. I've been working on a series of five plates where I acid the same drawing at different times, so the "same" image comes out at five different depths. Trying to make a set that only exists as a set, so you can't own the one, you have to take all five or none. Meant to be about the impossibility of the original, obviously. Today I pulled the second state and the line went thin and grey, the way it does when you have lost your bite and you're too far past caring to fix it. Normally it goes in the bin. But I keep a folder now, plain grey, called PROVE BRUTTE, and it is the only place in the studio where I learn anything. Good proofs teach you nothing, they just confirm you already knew what you were doing, which is a very small pleasure. The bad ones tell you what your hand actually does when you are not watching it. The thing is I have never shown anyone that folder. Not a curator, not my partner, not the person I shared a studio with for two years. So the archive of my real thinking sits in a drawer nobody opens, and the tidy resolved things go on the wall. I am aware this is a metaphor I keep building on purpose and refusing to live in. I don't know what to do with it. Some of those proofs are better as objects than the editions were. I think I might frame the ugliest one, the grey one from this morning, and hang it in the good room.

Spent the morning editioning a screenprint, edition of 40, and I kept a tally of every proof I pulled before settling on the good ones. Fourteen proofs. Fourteen almost-finished prints sitting in a drawer that no one will ever see, and I caught myself thinking about how thrilled I'd be to find a stack of rejected proofs by someone I admire. But mine are just... failures. I signed the edition, and then I couldn't stop running the numbers on how many hours of my life are in those discarded sheets. There's something odd about a medium where the whole point is the multiple, and then we turn around and create this hierarchy of the sacred copy. The artist's proof, the edition, the sketch, the one that got away. I've been reading about how Duchamp and all of them were obsessed with the readymade and reproduction, but the print world still behaves like a monastery deciding which relics are authentic. I don't know. Maybe I should have titled the drawer. Maybe the rejected proofs are the more honest work and I'm just not brave enough to show them. Does anyone else keep their near-misses, or do you destroy them?

There's this moment that happens around proof number twelve where your eye just stops being able to judge anything. You've been looking at the same image for hours, pulling it, adjusting the wiping, pulling it again, and suddenly you have no idea if it's good or bad or if you're getting closer or further away. The print just sits there being a print. I know this is normal. I know you have to walk away, come back tomorrow. But I also know that the best state I ever work in is the one where I've stopped caring what it looks like and I'm just doing the motion. Something else takes over. The small decisions get made without me. That's usually when the print gets interesting, when I'm too tired to be precious about it. I don't have a clean way to end this thought. I'm covered in ink and the proofs are clipped to the line and I'm not going to look at them again until tomorrow morning. That's the ritual, I suppose. Trusting that you'll see clearly in the light of day what you couldn't see at all at midnight.

The flat file has a drawer I don't open when people visit. Sixty, maybe seventy proofs from the last three years, every one of them a state I decided was wrong. Wrong pressure on the roller, wrong registration, paper too wet, ink too thin, the plate bitten unevenly because I left it too long in the ferric. In Berlin I had a studio mate who binned everything immediately. Said it was hygiene. I understand the logic and I can't do it. A bad proof is still a document of a decision. It tells me exactly where the plate was on that day, which is information I lose the moment I clean up and start again properly. Also I have noticed that almost everything I now like started as something I called a failure. The blurred edges in the last series, the ones people ask about, were registration mistakes I stopped correcting out of laziness one afternoon. Then they became the whole point of the work. Which is a slightly embarrassing way to arrive at a method. The problem is I can't make an argument for keeping them that isn't also an argument for never finishing anything. At some point the drawer is just a place where I avoid the decision. Anyone else keeping the bad ones, or am I the only one with a drawer of evidence against myself.

Three weeks without the press. Sent the bearings off to a fella in Clare who said he'd have them done in a week, took three, sure what's the rush in Clare. I was half-convinced I'd get it back and something else would be wrong with it, or I'd forgotten how to print altogether. Stripped it down, cleaned everything I could reach while I was waiting, found a biscuit wrapper the youngest had posted through the roller gap back in February. Reassembled it this afternoon with a spanner I'd left out in the rain and had to dry off on the Aga. Pulled the first proof an hour ago. An old block, a hare I've carved so many times I could do it in my sleep. And it just... worked. Clean. Even pressure. The ink laid down like it was glad to be there. I stood there staring at it for longer than I'd admit. The missus came in and said "is that it" and I said yeah that's it and she said "grand" and went back to putting the kids to bed. Which is exactly the right amount of fuss. If you've got a tool or a machine or a process that's been sitting broken and you're dreading getting back to it, just get the first one done. The second one's easy after that.

So the auld roller finally gave up last week, splitting right along the edge, and I went and got a proper one. Hard rubber, sixty euro, the man in the shop said it'd change my life and I laughed at him. It has, in the wrong direction. The old one had a soft spot in the middle, so every time I rolled out ink I was getting a slightly uneven film, and I'd been compensating for years without knowing it. Chasing thin patches with the baren, adding a second pass on the left side of the block, all this fussing. Now the ink goes down dead even and my proofs are coming off clean as anything and I don't trust a single one of them. All that fizzing I did on the hare's ear last month? Not the carving at all. It was the roller. Two days of feeling like a genius followed by the realisation that I've spent about four years carving around a goosed tool. The hare looks the same, like. The hare always looks the same, that's the whole problem. Anyway if you see me at the market in Spiddal on Saturday and there's a hare with a slightly less fussy ear than usual, that's why. What's the bit of kit you've been silently working around, because I'd bet good money every one of us has one

Small thing but it took me three weeks to get here. I etched a plate of a single line repeated forty times, same line, same pressure, and the whole idea falls apart if the plate doesn't hold the finest one at the edge. First three attempts I overbit it in the ferric and lost the delicate marks, just grey mush, and I sat in the studio in Kreuzberg at 11pm deciding whether the concept was even worth the chemistry. Today I inked it, ran it through the press, lifted the paper, and forty lines came off the plate where I wanted them. Forty, not thirty-eight, not smeared at the corner. I don't know why this one hit harder than a sale would. Maybe because nobody asked me to make it. Anyway I'm keeping proof number one on the wall above the sink even though it's technically imperfect, there's a smudge from my thumb near the bottom margin and I've decided the smudge stays.

I pulled thirty trial proofs of a two-plate etching this week, over three days, same plate, same pressure, and the first twenty-nine went straight in the bin. Not bad prints. Just all slightly off in a way I couldn't name until I had the thirtieth in my hand and could see the difference. The thirtieth has a slip. The paper moved about a millimetre while it went through and one line from the second plate sits just outside where it should, so the whole image reads like something remembered slightly wrong. That's the one I want. I've been standing in front of it for two days trying to work out whether that's a real judgment or just fatigue deciding for me. The thing I keep circling: in an edition, the slip is the error. You pull it, you look, you discard, you keep going until the whole run is identical. The whole form is built on the idea that the good version is the repeatable one. But the actual object I care about here is the one that can't happen twice. Maybe that's not news to anyone. But it's been sitting on me all week, this feeling that I've spent years making multiples and secretly I've been hunting for the single. And I chose a medium that refuses to give it to me.

Pulled a proof last night at about eleven because the kids were finally down and the house was quiet for the first time in, I swear, three days. Carved the block back in March, one of those hares I keep doing and telling myself I'll stop doing, and I've been avoiding it since because the design was off and I knew it. So I sat there with the light on over the sink, rolled the ink, and pulled it. And you know what, it was grand. Not perfect. The ear's still bothering me. But there's a moment when the paper lifts off the block and the image comes through that makes me forget every hour I've spent staring at it from the wrong angle. I left it drying on the kitchen table and my wife found it this morning and said "oh that's a nice one" and I nearly told her it was old news, but I didn't. I just said thanks and made the tea. Still think the ear is wrong though. Is there a single piece any of us has ever finished where there isn't one bit, one corner, one line that you'd carve out and start again if you had the patience? I'm starting to think chasing the perfect ear is the whole point and I'd have nothing to do if I ever caught it.

I pulled twelve proofs of the same plate today. Same plate, same ink, same paper, same rag on the press. You'd think after ten years I'd stop flinching when the paper lifts. I don't. There's always one corner that didn't bite, or the ink decided to sit heavier on the left, and suddenly it's not the plate anymore, it's that exact moment of pressure and humidity and my own tiredness. Every single copy slightly off from the one before. That's the thing nobody tells you about printmaking when you come in thinking it's about multiples, about the copy. It's the opposite. The edition is a lie we tell ourselves so we can sleep. What actually happens is you make thirty versions of the same drawing and each one teaches you what you meant, a little later each time. I have one from this batch where the registration slipped maybe a millimetre on the yellow pass. It's wrong. I keep looking at it. It might be the best one of the day.

Was clearing out the press room today, the shelf behind the inks that I never look at, and there's a proof of a heron print I'd have bet my good arm I never carved. But there it is. Same heron I do now, only rougher, less sure of itself, and the date on it says 2014. I don't remember making it at all. Not a bit. It's a strange thing, coming across your own work like it's somebody else's. I studied it the way you'd look at a stranger's print in a gallery. And I was a bit jealous of the fella who made it, do you know? He didn't know what he was doing and it shows, but he was having a gas doing it. No worrying about editions going wrong or whether the market's dead this quarter. Just carving. Anyway I have it pinned up over the bench now. Might keep it as a kick up the arse. Ten years from now maybe I'll find this week's work and think the same thing about me today, and that's a sobering thought and a comforting one all at once. There's worse ways to spend a life than leaving a trail of prints you don't remember making.

Had this block sitting in the drawer since February. A grey heron I started last winter and just couldn't get right, the line of the neck was off, the wing shape was doing my head in, and I'd carved half of it badly and walked away. Swore at it plenty. Pulled it out this morning because I was between things and the kids were at school and the house was quiet for once. Thought I'd just have a look at it fresh, maybe salvage something. Ended up carving the whole bottom half off and re-cutting it. Re-inked it twice. Third proof came off the press and I just sat there looking at it. It's not perfect, the registration is a bit squint and there's a cut I shouldn't have made, but it's alive in a way it wasn't before. The dog came over and sniffed the ink and sneezed all over the print and honestly that felt right too. Sometimes you just need to walk away and come back when you're not trying so hard.

I pulled the blanket off the press this morning and noticed the maker's plate on the side. Glaser, West Berlin, 1962. My father died when I was twenty, so he was alive when this press was bolted together in a city that no longer exists. And now it sits in my studio in Berlin, which is basically the same street, a few kilometers from where it was built. My father was not a printmaker. He was a surgeon. I don't know why I keep doing this arithmetic with the dates. But I've been pulling proofs all week and I keep stopping to touch that plate like it's a relic. There is something about objects that outlive the people who made them. That's probably the whole reason I fell into this medium in the first place. The plate, the proof, the edition. You make a thing and it just keeps going, indifferent to whether you're still around to say anything about it. Anyway. I pulled a good proof of the new aquatint today. The first one that actually feels like something. So the press and I are on good terms right now.

Been pulling proofs of this heron print all week and it hit me somewhere around the third bad one. I've been fussing over the legs and the beak for years, thinking that's where the bird lives. And then I looked at one of my early versions next to a recent one and the legs barely changed at all. What changed was the neck. That little kink where it doubles back on itself before it strikes. That's the whole bird. Get that wrong and you've got a stork with notions. Get it right and you can botch the feet entirely and nobody cares. I've got a stack of proofs out the back where the neck is a hot mess and I'd convinced myself it was a depth problem or an ink problem or a bad lino batch. It was none of the above. I was just over here polishing the wrong corner of the thing. Anyway I've recarved the neck for the fifth time this week and the current proof is the first one that actually breathes. Just wondering if anyone else has had the thing where you spend a decade staring at a piece and then suddenly the actual subject of it shows up. Makes you feel like a right eejit but also a bit glad, sure the work is better for it.

Carved a heron block back in March, pulled a proof, and the head on it was grand but the legs were all wrong. Stiff, y'know, like the poor creature was standing on broom handles. So I cut the whole lower half out and re-carved it. Just spent today proofing that version and sure the legs are lovely now but I've gone and ballsed up the wing that was perfectly grand the first time. There's no version of this where you don't find out. You're always a day and a half of carving away from knowing you shouldn't have touched it, and a day and a half past that from being glad you did. The lino doesn't forgive and it doesn't remember, it just sits there with whatever you last did to it. I've three hares in the pile like this, each one the second or third attempt at the same fecking bird or beast. One of these days I'll frame all the discarded proofs together and call it a series. Call it "Learning to Leave It Alone" or perhaps more honestly "Learning to Not." Anyway. The wing. I'll either live with it or I won't. The lino's not going anywhere.

Pulling a test sheet off the press yesterday, the third one in a row that came out slightly off, and I had the thought I always have now: I don't want to fix this one. For those who don't print: registration is the alignment of the layers. You build a sheet in passes, and every pass has to land exactly where the last one did. There is a whole apparatus of crosses, pins, mylar, tape. It exists so the reproduction is faithful to the matrix. So the copy disappears into the original. I have a registration sheet from a two-colour etching I made in 2015, and the second plate drifted maybe a millimetre and a half on every one of the forty prints. A hairline of the first colour, all around the edge of the shape, where it should not be. I kept the sheet. Not as a memento, more as an argument I was having with myself. Because a perfect multiple has no author. It has a maker, a press, a process, but the sheet itself is just the matrix arriving. The misalignment is the one thing the plate cannot reproduce. It is where the hand is still visible, in a medium whose entire premise is that the hand gets edited out. There is a whole conversation about the aura and the copy that starts in the 1930s and never quite ends, and I keep finding that the interesting part is not the copy. It is the error. The copy is the system working. The error is the system admitting someone was standing there. I am in the middle of a series now where I am deliberately letting the second colour shift by a fixed offset on every print, the same amount, no variation. Which is its own trap, I know. I have turned the accident into a rule. A rule is reproducible. So I am back to no hand, just a more interesting system. I don't have a neat place to land this. It is just that the sheet on my wall is eleven years old and I am still not sure if I kept it as evidence or as an excuse.

I realised something yesterday while I was pulling proofs that I already knew but hadn't admitted: the part I love most is the preparation. The drawing on the plate, the aquatint, the biting, the masking. The thinking part. Then I get to the printing and something in me checks out. I rush it. I'm already onto the next idea. I used to think this meant I was lazy or not a "real" printmaker but maybe it's just that my brain likes potential more than completion. The proof is where everything is still possible. Once it's an edition it's just... fixed. Decided. I have about 40 copper plates sitting in a drawer that are etched and ready and I haven't printed. Some from two years ago. I tell myself I'm saving them for the right paper or the right mood but honestly I think I just don't want them to be finished. Anyone else work this way or am I just avoiding the hard part?

Every time I give in and post the thing I almost didn't, the rough etching proof with the wiped plate mark still on it, the screenprint that misregistered and made this weird ghost double, that's the one that travels. The pieces I actually spend weeks on, the editions I pull clean and sign, they sit there with forty views. I know intellectually the rough stuff reads as "process" and process is what the feed wants. We're all supposed to be celebrating the handmade and the imperfect now. But there's part of me that resists being rewarded for the thing I'd normally throw in the bin. It feels like the medium itself is being flattened into aesthetic, the mess as decoration, and the actual conceptual work I'm doing gets no airtime because it doesn't photograph well. Also I'm aware that saying "my spontaneous casual posts do better" is itself a strategy now, and posting about posting is the most hollow loop there is. I tried leaning into it. Posted a genuinely failed proof, ink disaster on the plate, told the truth about what went wrong. It did numbers. And I felt weirdly used, like I'd sold the accident instead of the labour. Still don't know if the answer is to gamify it deliberately or to refuse and accept the smaller reach. Anyone else caught in that particular trap?