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I have this shallow drawer in my flat-file that's just chaos. Scraps of paper too small to use, edges I trimmed off, bits of envelopes, a receipt from an exhibition in Copenhagen three years ago, one single glove. Everything else in the studio is ruthlessly ordered, papers sorted by colour and weight, tools in their places. But that drawer is a mess and I can't bring myself to clean it. I think it's because if I sorted it, all those tiny bits would stop being potential and just become trash. As long as they're in the drawer they might still be something. I know that's not rational. But I don't think the studio needs to be rational everywhere.

I remember one studio visit early on. The artist's space was… a controlled chaos. Paintings everywhere, materials piled high, but there was a deep focus. It made me re-evaluate my own need for order. What was one studio visit that stuck with you, and why?

cleaned my entire workspace yesterday. spent like 2 hours reorganizing, threw out old dried up paint tubes, wiped down the palette, the whole thing. looked at it and felt very adult and put together. woke up this morning and it already looks like a bomb went off. there's a rogue paint lid stuck to my forearm and i don't remember when that happened. i think the desk just reproduces chaos overnight when i'm not looking. it's personal at this point. anyway the painting i'm working on is going fine but the space around it is actively hostile. who else's studio is just a controlled disaster that you've given up on pretending to tame

Young artist friend came by with a curator she's courting. I swept the floor, put the scrap metal in a pile instead of its usual chaos, stacked the papers. The visit went fine. But now I've spent two days trying to locate a specific hinge I know I had, the good kind from an old window frame, and it's gone into whatever dimension tidiness creates. The mess was load-bearing. It was my filing system. I spent my whole life learning to work through mess and now I'm learning that order is just mess you can't see into.

I have a rule now: two emails, then I stop. First follow-up after two weeks, second after another, and then I let it go. Because I've had galleries ask for studio visits, get excited, ask for more images, and then just vanish into the void. And the chase after that starts to feel undignified, you know? But sometimes I wonder if I'm too quick to drop it. The art world is chaos, people forget, maybe the third email is the one that lands. A friend of mine got her first solo show because she emailed the same curator five times over two years. Where's the line for you? Two and done, or do you keep nudging until you get a word?

I spent yesterday afternoon reorganizing the flat files, moving the drying rack, finally putting the riso where I can actually reach it without climbing over a chair. Everything has a place now. It's beautiful. I walked in this morning and sat down and couldn't do a thing. It's not just the disruption. It's that the chaos was doing something for me, the mess had a logic, piles I'd reach for without thinking, everything I needed within arm's reach even if it looked like a disaster to anyone else. Now I have to learn where I live again. I keep opening the wrong drawer. Maybe there's something here about how the friction of a space is part of how we think in it. The stumble, the wrong drawer, the thing you knock over, that's also material. A too-efficient studio is a studio that doesn't talk back. Or maybe I just need a week to break it in again. But I'm annoyed at myself for fixing something that wasn't broken.