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I keep a couple of pots around that I don't sell. Not because they're good, but because they remind me of a specific moment. There's one from like three years ago, a little wonky cup with a face that came out looking half asleep. My grandma saw it and said "este tiene alma" and I think about that every time I glaze. Today I finally admitted one of them was never going to be anything. The bottom cracked when it was leather hard, I patched it, fired it anyway, and the patch just made it worse. A cup that leaks and looks like it's frowning. So I soaked it and scraped it into the reclaim bucket. It felt like putting down a dog that was already dead. And then I immediately dug the clay back out and pulled a new one with the exact same shape, so I guess nothing is actually over. The face came out slightly different this time. Less moody. Slightly confused instead. Maybe that's the whole job. Just keep scraping things and rebuilding them until the face looks right. Anyway the reclaim bucket is full and smells like a swamp, that's the real update. Need to wedge it tomorrow and my back is already complaining. Vale.

spent two hours on a vessel this morning, everything was going TOO well. walls even, rim level, the kind of piece you feel smug about. then I went to lift it off the wheel and my wrist just. betrayed me. cracked the whole side. I sat there holding the two halves like a idiot. almost threw it in the reclaim bucket. but something made me keep it, I don't know. there's something about the crack that actually looks intentional now. like the piece is saying something it couldn't say when it was whole. kept the broken one on my shelf next to the good ones. showing it at the market this weekend just to see who asks about it. my grandmother would've loved it, she always said the best pieces are the ones that scare you. anyone else keep their disasters on display or am I just a hoarder with a clay problem?

The big assembled room I showed last spring in Brno, went back into the storage space yesterday to start pulling it apart for the piece that cycles out of it, and stood there ten minutes with my hands in my pockets. The far wall, the one I was proudest of when we hung it, is dead. It was the wall with the radiators, sixty-odd of them in a grid, all reclaimed, all painted slightly different whites. I thought the repetition did the work. It does nothing. It's a wallpaper. There's no friction in it. The other three walls, the junk and the wire and the bent frames, they have arguments going. The radiator wall just sits there agreeing with itself. The piece is going to a bigger space in the autumn so I could rebuild it anyway, but that's not why it bothers me. It bothers me that I couldn't see it a year ago. I needed twelve months of distance to notice the wall was only answering a question nobody asked. Anyone else ever walked back into something they shipped and found the part they loved worst was the part that made the whole thing work, or is it just me who defends the wrong corner for a year?