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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.

Not the rust itself, the water. Had a mason jar of it on the shelf since probably 2023, lid rusted shut, and I finally cracked it open to use on the bottom edge of the big piece and it just smelled like a basement. Corked it and put it in the trash bag before I could talk myself out of it. Two years of a jar taking up shelf space because I was sure I'd need exactly that color. I did not need exactly that color. I mixed a passable one in about four minutes with burnt umber and a drop of payne's grey. Anyway the shelf has room now and I hate it.

I spent three weeks untangling this wire. My hands were torn to shit. My studio looked like a murder scene made of rust. My son came over and asked if I'd finally lost it completely. Hung it yesterday. It's just wire. Nothing added. The thing holds the space like it was always waiting to get out of that coop. You don't get to choose what the good material is. You just have to be awake when it shows up. I was awake this time.

It is about two meters, galvanized, flattened at one end where a machine got it. I found it in a demolition pile near Holešovice in 2019. It has been in the corner, then against the door, then behind the radiator, then in the corner again. Four studios' worth of moving it around. It has never been in a piece. Every few months I decide I will use it and then I put it back. Once I actually raised it against the wall, looked at it a long time, took it down. I don't think I am saving it. I think the pipe is a small admission that not everything has to become work. Most of the good objects I have, I ruined by using them. Anyway it is currently leaning on the wrong side of the door and I have to step around it every time I go for coffee.

So this is a small one, 9x12, a barn at the edge of a field I drive past on the way to my daughter's swim practice. I've painted the roof four times now. I wiped it off twice with a wet rag, scraped once, painted over it once. The problem is I keep making the roof too even. Like tile, when it should read as corrugated metal with rust eating into it. Every time I lay the lines in I make them all the same distance apart and the same value, and it looks like a barcode. My brain knows better and my hand still does it. The thing I'm actually stuck on: do I fight it and keep the corrugation visible, or do I just push the whole roof back into shadow so the eye doesn't go there at all and let the light sit on the field instead? Second option feels like cheating, but I've been on this roof for three evenings after bedtime and I'm starting to resent the painting. Also I'm working with a Mars black I mixed with a little burnt sienna for the rust and it keeps coming out orange in a way that looks like a pumpkin. Might be the paint, might be me.

Client sent me photos of the finished job last week. Nine hundred euros, powder coated, installed. I went and looked at it because I am that kind of fool. The uprights are 40mm box with a wall thickness I would not put on a handrail a child leans on. Welds are ground smooth on the outside and never touched on the inside, so there is nothing there to rust from. Give it two winters on a coastal street and I know what it will look like. Nobody asked me. My price was 1,800 and 1,400 of that was material and my own hours, honestly counted. I cannot get under it without lying to myself about the time. The part that sticks is that the client was polite about it. Said they went with the cheaper quote and sent me pictures out of courtesy. Fine. That is how it works and I have no argument with them. I just do not know what I am supposed to do with the number when the number is the reason I lose the job. Dropping to 1,200 does not make the railing cheaper to make. It makes me slower and worse.

A consultant they hired said my feed lacked "curatorial coherence." Too much workshop mess, too many odd details, not enough of a unified aesthetic. So I posted a photo of a pigeon I found in my studio courtyard. Dead. Beautiful grey feathers, one wing slightly open, eye still clear. I put it on a piece of rusted sheet metal and photographed it in the morning light. Caption: "Studio assistant quit." It got more engagement than anything I'd posted in six months. The gallery was not amused. But two collectors messaged me asking if it was available as a print. I don't know what the moral is. Something about the polished version of ourselves being the least interesting one. Or that dead birds sell. One of those.

Studio floor is currently a museum of other people's junk. Sorting for the autumn show, three years of hoarding, and there is one piece I keep walking around: a cast-iron stove door, rusted shut, from a flat on Vinohradská that got gutted last year. It's the best object in the room and I won't put it in. Reason is stupid. It's too good on its own. You set it down anywhere and it does the whole job by itself, and then the room around it just becomes a plinth for a nice rusty thing. Which is fine, that's a career, plenty of people do it, but it's not what I've spent thirty years learning to do. So it sits in the corner and I build everything else and every morning I look at it like a dog at a table. I know the honest answer is probably "use it and stop being precious," and I also know that answer is a trap. Sometimes the object that carries the piece is the one that kills it. Mostly writing this down so I stop pretending it isn't the actual problem.

Had a piece out in the weather since 2019, a tall steel form on a corporate plaza downtown. I welded it with a guy half my age helping me, and I argued with myself the whole way about one joint near the base. Wind load, thermal movement, all of it. I knew better. Did it anyway because the schedule said so. Went by there today to check on something else and stood under it for a while. That joint is clean. No cracking, no rust bleeding through the seam where I was sure it would go. Thirteen years on steel and I still don't trust a good weld until the weather has had a few seasons at it. Checked every connection while I was there. All of them fine. Thought about telling the young guy who helped me but I dont know if hes even still fabricating. Some people move on from this work. Just nice to be wrong about a thing once in a while.

Three weeks on one little town map from 1892, mostly coaxing rust and foxing off a corner someone spilled coffee on a hundred years ago. Nobody at the show will see it. But it's flat now, and it wasn't, and that's enough. Sometimes the quietest work is the whole job.

A museum in Brno asked for a piece built from scrap. Fine, my medium. I spent three weeks hauling steel from a yard outside the city, cutting, grinding, welding, four days just cleaning rust off plates so the walls of the room didn't look like a crime scene. Materials cost me maybe 4,000 crowns. They were going to pay me 60,000 for the whole thing. I did the math the night before the install and it came out to about 180 crowns an hour before taxes. That's under seven euros. The scrap was free, which means what I was actually charging for was the part the museum thinks is the easy bit. I sent the invoice anyway. Signed it, drove home, opened a beer. The room is good. I'll forget the arithmetic before the room comes down.

Been posting these photos of abandoned silos for months, mostly because I can't stop driving past them on the way to the studio. No hashtag strategy, just whatever time of day I happened to pull over. A feed is basically dust and rust. Anyway a land trust emailed me yesterday. They've been following the series and want me to shoot a whole network of failing farm structures before they get torn down. They're paying. Real money, not exposure. The stuff I actually tried to sell, the polished pieces, got me nothing but crickets. The thing I did just because I couldn't look away is the one with value. I keep relearning this and it keeps being embarrassing.

Back in 2009 I had a show in a small gallery in Brno that no longer exists. The gallery put up a basic website with installation shots. When the gallery closed, the domain died but the PDF of that exhibition somehow stayed live on some forgotten server subfolder. Last year a curator from Oslo emailed me. Said she found that PDF through a deep Google search while researching a specific material I used. She'd been looking for anyone working with industrial felt and rusted steel in that particular way. The PDF was the only document online that showed it. She booked a studio visit. I got two museum shows out of it. Norway, of all places. Meanwhile I'd been stressing about Instagram, trying to shoot better video, wondering if the algorithm hated me. And the thing that worked was a dead link from 15 years ago that I didn't even know existed. I don't know what the lesson is. Leave things online and don't delete them, I suppose. The internet forgets slower than we think. Or maybe it's that the useful person is always looking in the wrong place and you can't predict where they'll dig.

Sold a piece from 1984 this week. Was one of the first things I ever welded on my own, a little figure in rebar, rough as hell. The welds are ugly, I can see every mistake in it. It's been sitting in my attic for forty years because I never thought anyone would want it. A woman from Ohio saw a photo my daughter posted of my workshop and asked about it. I told her it was apprentice work, not good, she should look at something else. She insisted. Paid more than I would have asked for it. I packed it up careful, wrapped the parts I'd have let go. Felt strange sending it off. That piece taught me the right way to hold a torch through every bad weld on it, and now it's going to live in someone's house instead of quietly rusting up there. Not sure what the lesson is. Maybe that you don't get to decide what's finished with you.

Somewhere in the last year the old tuner in the studio stopped finding anything but Czech Radio Vltava, and at first this annoyed me because I like to choose. Now I don't touch it. It comes on when I unlock the door, goes off when I leave, and the whole day has a soundtrack of string quartets and a woman reading poetry I half understand because I am usually not listening. What I notice: the work goes better on the days I don't touch the dial. Not because of the music. Because the dial is one less decision, and I make enough of those dragging a rusted gate hinge across the floor to see if it belongs in the corner or by the window. I have a friend who works in total silence. He says the radio is noise. I think he is wrong but I would not argue it with him, he is bigger than me. Anyway. The station plays a weather report for farmers at ten past six and I have started planning my day around it, which is a ridiculous thing for a man who has not touched soil since 1989 to do. But the man on the radio sounds like he knows something I don't, and I trust him more than the gallery. That's the whole post, really.

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.

Hung the ladder installation this week after sitting on it for two years. Balustrade section, cast iron, from a staircase they tore down on Vodičkova, plus the usual family of small objects nested in the rungs: a rusted lock, a key that opens nothing I own, a child's sock in a color nobody makes anymore. I was sure it was done. Then the gallery put it up and suddenly I saw five things I'd do differently, and also I saw that it was maybe never about the ladder at all, which is either a discovery or the sign I should let the thing go the hell away from me. Sitting in the studio it was finished. On a wall it's an argument I'm losing. That gap between the two has never closed for me in forty years of this, and I wonder if it ever closes for anyone or if we just get better at pretending the wall isn't right about us.

Got a call in April about a granite balustrade on a building off Franklin. Turn of the century work. One of the iron posts had rusted through at the base and the whole section was sagging maybe two inches. Building owner wanted it replaced. I told him no. The granite was fine. It was the iron shoe that died. So I cut the old shoe off, forged a new one to match the profile, pinned it through the stone with two stainless rods and set it in epoxy. Took two days. Cost him a third of what a replacement run would have. Went back last week to check it. Still dead level. The building's been there since 1928. That repair should outlast both of us. I keep thinking about how easy it would have been to rip the whole thing out and put something new in. That's what everybody does now. Nobody wants to repair anything anymore. But the granite had another hundred years in it. The pattern on that balustrade is not something you order off a catalog. Repair work doesn't get you shows. Nobody writes an essay about the post you saved. But standing there last week with a level in my hand, watching that needle hold dead center, that was a good afternoon. If you're a young fabricator, learn to fix things. Not just make things. There's a trade in it and it'll keep you honest.

I've got this pair of scissors I bought for 35 kronor at a flea market maybe ten years ago. The pivot is loose, the blades don't quite meet at the tip anymore, and there's a rust spot near the screw that I've stopped trying to clean off. They look like they should be useless. But they cut paper exactly the way I want, a little rough, a little unpredictable, not that clean surgical snip you get from a new blade. I've tried replacing them twice with nicer scissors and both times I went back within a week. I don't know if it's muscle memory or just that I've learned exactly how they'll fail. But they're the only tool I own that I'd actually be unsettled to lose.

I spent this morning walking around a space I was offered for a show in April. Big clean white box. Good light. Totally dead to me. Couldn't feel a thing. I need a room that already smells like something. Dust, damp, machine oil, old wood, whatever. If it smells like fresh paint and nothing else I might as well work in a hospital corridor. My studio right now smells of rust and the glue I used three years ago that never fully aired out. That's what gets me going. I turned the white box down. Found an old engine hall instead. Smells like grease and 1987. I can work there.