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I had this snapshot from a box of estate photos, four people at a beach, all of them squinting, one guy holding a cigarette like a pen. The whole left edge was water damaged and the emulsion had gone this pale tea colour. Perfect. I used it in a piece in March. Then last Tuesday I decided it was sentimental and threw it in the blue bin with the jars. Spent 40 minutes this morning in the recycling in the rain because I remembered there was a kid in the back of the shot, half cut off, holding a plastic shovel. half his face is gone now. it's just a smudge. and I need that smudge. anyway the bins were collected Wednesday. the smudge is in a landfill outside town and I'm sitting here trying to remember what half a face looked like. this is the third time I've done this to myself. I do not learn.

found a box of my parents' old divorce papers in my storage unit last weekend. thirty years of legal filings, bank statements from accounts that don't exist anymore, letters between lawyers. almost threw it out. instead i spent three days tearing it up and collaging it onto a panel with charcoal over the top. felt gross at first, like i was violating something. then i realized those papers were already dead. the marriage was dead, the money long gone. i'm just making something honest out of the paperwork of it all. nobody's seen it yet. not sure i want anyone to, actually. but it's the most alive i've felt in the studio in months. there's something about using the actual artifacts instead of just alluding to them. does anyone else keep the raw material of their own mess and turn it into work? or is that just me being morbid

Unloading a 400-pound welded piece off the truck today and the delivery driver nods at it and says, "You know the city takes scrap metal on Tuesdays." I just stood there holding my end of it. Wasn't even mad. There's a whole category of people who look at something made by hand and only see what it weighs. Pallet jack scraped a gash in my knuckle while we wrestled it into the studio. Cleaned it with turpentine because that's what was in reach. Probably should have used soap. Anyway. Piece is in place. It'll outlive the guy who asked about the curb. That's the thing nobody in a hurry ever gets about steel, or stone, or anything you actually build. It doesn't care if you were in a rush.

Bought a kitchen scale to weigh out portions and got curious. Weighed all the clay I've recycled from failed pieces this month. 14 kilos. That's like a whole other person made of my mistakes. And that's just what I saved, not counting what went to the bin. I tell myself it's part of the process and it is, but 14 kilos of almost-art is a humbling number. My grandmother thinks I'm being "persistent" in a sweet way. The kiln knows the truth. Anyway the recycling bucket is full again and I refuse to do the slip dry dance today so it's going to sit there staring at me until tomorrow. The studio is 60% clay ghosts at this point.

My Bologna neighbor, who I've said good morning to for four years, watches me haul a stack of zinc and copper plates up three flights every few weeks. Today he finally asked, with genuine concern in his voice, if I was "doing some kind of scrap metal art marathon" and whether I needed a hand because the plates looked "heavy for my frame." I thanked him and said no, it's printmaking, it's etching. He nodded slowly and said, "Ah, like the recycling." Not the worst interpretation. Honestly some days that's exactly what it is. I keep the bad plates, you know, the ones that printed wrong or the ground failed, and I have a whole graveyard of them under the studio table because I can't throw metal away. It's a hoarding problem disguised as ecological conscience. So maybe he's not wrong. The marathon part I can't defend. I did not tell him that the plates are copper because copper holds a line better than zinc and that I think about this more than I think about most people in my life. Some conversations stay at the door.

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.

ok so I'm working on this piece right now, it's a really soft grey-blue morning scene of my neighbor's cat on the fire escape, and I've been staring at the blank paper for like twenty minutes because I know the second I lay down that first wash, that's IT. there's no undoing it. you can lift a little but you can't un-wet the paper. and I think that's what people who don't work in watercolor don't get, the courage it takes to just COMMIT. every other medium you can paint over, scrape back, repaint. watercolor holds the record of every choice you made. I messed up the first attempt and it's sitting crumpled in my recycling bin right now. the second one is going better because I finally just breathed and went for it, but wow. my heart was actually pounding. anyone else have that moment where you just have to close your eyes and put the brush down and trust it??

I was so sure this little vessel with the face emerging on the side was gone. There was a line I thought was a crack after the bisque firing, I almost threw it in the recycling bucket. Decided to fire it anyway out of stubbornness, or laziness, honestly, I was tired. Opened the kiln at 8am and it's not a crack. It's a thin dark line in the glaze that follows the curve of the piece and it looks like the figure is smiling through a scar. I sat on the floor with it for five minutes just turning it in my hands. These moments where the kiln decides something for you. I swear half the time I'm just the assistant and the fire is the real artist.

There's this little vessel I made like three months ago. Handbuilt, sort of egg-shaped with a neck that bends too far to the left. I underfired it by accident and the glaze came out this weird milky grey instead of the deep green I wanted. Honestly I hate looking at it. It sits on my shelf and I keep meaning to recycle the clay. But every single person who comes to my stall picks it up. Like, reaches for it before anything else. I sold four others just like it this weekend at the market in El Cabanyal and I don't understand why. One woman said it looked "honest." I don't even know what that means. I'm not complaining exactly, it's paying for more clay. But it messes with my head a little, like maybe what I think is a mistake is actually the thing that works? Or maybe people just like weird egg shapes. I don't know. Anyway if you're reading this and you bought the grey egg thing from me on Sunday, I hope you like it more than I do. genuinely.

I've had a shoebox of his paper junk on the shelf for six years. receipts, a parking ticket from 2009, a dry cleaning slip with a phone number on it that isn't his, grocery lists in that terrible handwriting. I always said the box was material. it was material. I finally went through it tuesday. sorted it, kept eleven things, put the rest in recycling. felt almost adult about it. now the piece I've been building around those receipts for two months is dead on the table. I keep going over to it and there's nothing. the eleven things I kept are the wrong eleven. I kept the ones that mean something instead of the ones that look like something, and it turns out I needed the parking ticket with the coffee ring on it, the boring one, the one that just says a guy parked somewhere and didn't pay. the gallery wants the piece in october. I could go dig through the bin but the truck came this morning and honestly I think that's the right answer anyway, keep it gone. anyway. hoarding is not a working method. it just feels like one.

I moved studios last month and finally faced the flat file I've been dragging around since 2014. Two full drawers are just bad editions. Not aborted, not developmental, just bad. Misregistered, muddy, or I simply didn't believe the image when I pulled it and it shows. I almost threw them out. Then I spent an hour pulling each one and trying to remember what I was thinking, and a strange thing happened: the bad ones are the most honest record of the work. The good prints are what I wanted to make. The bad ones are what I actually made while I was still figuring out what I wanted. They have more of me in them than the ones I'd frame. I kept maybe forty, gave the rest to the recycling. Now I'm wondering if I should build them into something. An edition of the failures. There's something in that idea that won't let go, about how printmaking is the medium that's supposed to launder the mistake out, and yet the mistakes are where the thinking happened.

I have about forty etching plates stacked in a corner of my Berlin studio and I know exactly which ones are on top, the ones I used last, the ones I still believe in. The ones at the bottom are the ones I don't want to look at. Some of them are good plates, technically. But they're associated with a show that went nowhere, or a residency where I was lonely, or an idea I didn't push far enough. So they sit there. I could file them properly, label them, give them a chance to be reused or at least recycled. Instead they're a kind of archaeological record of my disappointments. I'm not sure what to do with that. I think I'm supposed to say I'll clean the studio this weekend but we all know that's a lie.