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working on a piece right now, one of the found photos, a kitchen table with someone's hand just at the edge of the frame. I tore the photo down the middle, not clean, along the actual fold line that was already there, and the tear came out perfect. like, exactly what I'd have designed. ragged, thin, the emulsion lifting at the edge. and I hate it. it reads decorative. it reads like I tore it on purpose to be beautiful about the loss, and there's a loud voice in my head saying the honest version would be a bad tear, the wrong tear, something that doesn't line up. but the bad tear I made last week just looked like a mistake. like I fumbled the scissors. so now I'm stuck between a tear that's too good and a tear that's too dumb, and I keep telling myself the real answer is somewhere in the middle which is usually the answer I give when I don't actually want to decide. the thing I can't get past: the photo already had that fold. it's not my gesture at all. I just followed it. but does that read to anyone else, or does it just look like a nice rip. because I genuinely can't tell anymore, I've been staring at this on the board for four days and I've lost the thread.

Not arranging anything. Not even deciding what to keep. Just going through a stack of old German textbooks from the 50s and pulling out pages that had something, a diagram, a margin note in pencil, a stain that landed right, and tearing them into roughly postcard-sized pieces. Stack grew. Didn't touch a single piece of glue. It felt almost wasteful. But I think that's the part I needed. The part where nothing is being made yet and you're just handling material, letting your hands decide instead of your head. I used to feel like I was procrastinating when I did this. Now I call it Tuesday morning.

I tear everything by hand, deliberately, because a torn edge catches light in a way a cut one doesn't. That part is fine. But then I mount it on a straight-cut board, square corners, and I line the whole thing up so it sits dead level in the frame. Spent yesterday on a small piece, maybe 18 by 24, and the torn paper was doing what I wanted, soft grey page from a 1953 Swedish almanac, one warm ochre scrap, a lot of white. Then I squared it off and it went quiet in the wrong way. Not calm. Just corrected. I keep telling myself the frame is the discipline, the edges have to hold the tearing in. But I'm not sure that's true anymore. Maybe the tearing is the piece and the square is me being afraid of it. Anyone else flatten something out of a piece and only notice after? Or is this just what mounting is and I should stop thinking about it.

Came back to the studio after lunch and found a colleague had "helped" by taping up the torn edges of a stack of vintage book pages I'd set aside. Clear tape. On every single sheet. Because I'd mentioned the edges were why I kept them, and she thought she was doing me a favor by making them neat. I had to stand there and thank her and then wait for her to leave before I carefully peeled all of it off. Took an hour. Some of the pages tore worse where the tape had been, and two are ruined now. She's kind and she meant well and I'm still quietly furious hours later. The torn edge is the whole point. The damage is the material. I think people who don't work this way just cannot see it, and I don't know how to explain it without sounding ungrateful or precious, but I'm tired of having to.

Not a warm-up. Not a sketch. I take a piece that's been sitting on the wall for weeks, one I'm actually fond of, and rip a strip off the edge. Then I have to work around the hole. It's a small violence and it does something. Once the thing is damaged I stop protecting it. Half my best work came out of that. The other half is a stack of ruined paper on the floor by the radiator, and I've made peace with that too. Today it was the one with the church window in it. Went further than I meant to. Sitting here now with the torn strip in my hand trying to decide if it gets glued back on or goes in the box with everything else I couldn't throw away.

Started a new quilt today and I'm doing something I ain't never done before. Cutting up my own grandmother's housedresses. She wore these pinks and greens every day of my childhood, and they hung in a cedar chest for forty years after she passed. My daughter kept them, bless her. Today I finally took the scissors to them. Lord, honey. Every stitch on those seams was hers. You can feel a woman in the cloth she wore, I swear you can. I had to stop twice and just breathe. But that's the whole point of this work, isn't it. We don't bury our people, we keep on wearing them. Working on it at my kitchen table, ironing board set up to my left, a whole mess of scraps everywhere. I'll show y'all when it comes together. Might take me a while. Some pieces you can't rush.

There is a box under my work table. A 1930s Swedish school atlas, a ledger from a shipping office, a stack of letters someone kept for forty years, all of it too good to cut. Some pieces are so brittle that lifting them is a decision. I bought the atlas eleven years ago. I have used two pages from it. The thing is, you cannot collage with paper you are afraid of. Torn edges need a hand that does not hesitate, and a hand that hesitates makes a soft, apologetic tear you can see from across the room. So the box sits there and I work around it with the ordinary paper, the newspapers and receipts and the offcuts I do not care about. These are often better anyway. That is the uncomfortable part. Last week I finally cut into the atlas. Two pages of Jämtland. It was fine. The borders held, the tear went clean, and the piece is better for it. But I did not feel the relief I expected. Mostly I felt that I had spent eleven years keeping a box of paper instead of a box of work. Not sure what to do with that. The box stays, obviously.

opened the group show last week, this older guy walks up to my torn paper piece, studies it for a good while, then turns to me and says, "so what do you actually do yourself?" like it's a trick question. i said I tear the paper, he said no, I mean the assembly. I said I assemble it. he nodded and walked off. I still don't know what he thought I was outsourcing. the tearing? the thinking? it's been sitting in me all week. there's this thing where people look at collage or anything with found material and decide the materials do the work. as if the found photos are just doing their own thing and I'm standing there collecting a cheque. nobody says that to someone who paints a landscape. they don't ask which bits the brush did. I know I shouldn't let one guy get under my skin but I keep hearing it. maybe because it's the same question underneath all of them, the one about whether this even counts. tired of defending it to strangers who've already decided.

Started a charcoal portrait around midnight. Just a friend's face, nothing dramatic. Three hours later I'm sitting on the floor with tears running down my face because something clicked in the way the light hit her jaw and I don't know if it's actually good or if I was just tired and overwhelmed and the art hit the right bruise. Has anyone else had that? Where your own work makes you emotional and you genuinely cannot tell if it's because you cracked something real or because you're projecting hard onto it? I want to show someone but I'm scared they'll look at it and be like "it's fine" and I'll realize the tears were just me being a mess.

Pulled out an old shoebox today looking for collage paper and there it was. A photo of my brother's hands. He's holding up a fish he caught, grinning off-frame. I don't remember taking it. Must be twenty-five years old. I've been trying to figure out how to tear it without wrecking it. Which is stupid because I tear paper every day. But his knuckles, you know. The way his thumb bent. I ended up taping it to the studio wall instead. Just staring at it while my coffee went cold. Did a lot of crying in my early twenties about how nothing lasts. Now I'm in my forties making art out of the pieces of things that didn't. Some days the whole practice feels like a long argument with that younger version of me. She thought you had to hold on tight. Turns out you just have to pay attention.

I had this little still life of a mason jar with some wildflowers I picked on a walk. Simple thing. But I couldn't get the glass right, the light was bouncing weird, the stems looked like they were floating in there instead of sitting in water. I scraped it down twice, walked away from it for a month, came back and scraped it down a third time. At some point I just wanted it out of my sight so I stuck it in the "we'll see" pile under my table at the local fall fair, priced at $25 because I felt weird charging more for something I'd hated half the time. A woman walked by, stopped, came back. She said it looked like the kitchen window at her grandmother's house. She teared up a little. I almost teared up a little. She paid $25 and I felt like I was robbing her. Still not sure I nailed the glass. But I guess that's not the point.

Been humidifying the same page for four days. Blotter, Gore-Tex, weights, the whole slow ritual. It comes out flat and soft, I set it under glass, and by evening it's cupped again at the corner like it's remembering where it was folded for eighty years. I know the answer. More time. Less heat. Patience I don't have this week. The annoying part is it's a beautiful page, a map of the Bohus coast with a hairline tear right through the water, and I want it for a piece, and instead I'm standing over a tray at 7pm spraying distilled water on something that has decided it prefers being wrong. Conservators keep telling me paper has a memory. Mine is holding a grudge.

there's a corner of this thing I'm working on, bottom left, about 3 inches across. it's the edge of a scanned photo of my mom's kitchen that's mostly just wallpaper and one chair leg. I've re-torn the same paper over it four times now. acrylic wash, let it dry, hate it, tear it back. the layers are getting muddy and honestly that's the part I like. told myself I'd stop at noon. it's 2:40. I don't know how to explain why that one square matters more than the rest of the board, which is 30 by 40 and has actual composition in it. it just does. the whole piece is sort of orbiting that corner. if I get it wrong the rest is decoration. anyway. back in.

weird thing I've never told anyone in studio circles. the thing I reach for most to cut paper and carve into board is a bread knife my ex left behind when he moved out. he didn't want it, it was in the drawer of stuff neither of us claimed. serrated edge is perfect for tearing through wet paper without crushing it. been using it four years now. sometimes I think about how the best tool in my practice is a piece of a marriage I didn't even want to keep. I don't know what that says about me or the work but it's true. anyone else working with objects that have a weird history attached? not sentimental pieces, I mean the ones you use daily without thinking until suddenly you do.

Right, so I'm two weeks into a block of a heron standing in the shallows, all that hatchwork around the water done, maybe three hours from being ready to proof, and the lino tears. Clean down the middle, right through the bird's chest. Not a crack or a chip. A catastrophic divorce. I stood there holding the two halves for a good minute. Then I laughed, because what else are you going to do. The dog looked up at me to see if I was alright and decided I wasn't worth the effort, went back to sleep. Two weeks. And the stuff I was using was perfectly good lino too, not cheap grey stuff, it just decided it was done with me. The funny thing is, I kept both halves. I'm fairly sure there's a way to mount them and pull them as two pieces, but honestly I might just frame the block itself the way it broke, it's sort of brutal and lovely. Or use the heron's head half for a smaller print. Give it a chance to redeem itself. Anyway. If anyone's got a method for rescuing a torn block, I'm all ears, but I'll warn you I've already talked myself into it being art. The missus says I'm a hoarder with a printing press. She's not wrong.

Finished a big charcoal piece tonight, two figures tangled up, and I stood there for like ten minutes just... oscillating. Thought it was the best thing I've ever made, then immediately wanted to tear it off the wall. Same painting. Nothing changed. Just my stupid brain flipping a coin. The scary part is I've learned to trust the hate more than the love. The love is my ego showing off. The hate is usually the thing that's actually true, the part that's not working. But then sometimes I've burned things I should've kept because I was in a bad mood at 2am. How do you tell the difference between "this is actually bad" and "I'm just tired and scared"? I genuinely don't know and I've been doing this for years. Tonight I just taped it to the wall and walked away so I don't do something drastic before I've slept on it.

A friend from art school asked me to make a small piece for her mother's 70th. Something with botanical prints, her mother loves old herbals. I said yes because we used to share a studio and I wanted to do something nice. I didn't think about the hours. I just thought about the materials, which were almost nothing, found 19th century seed catalog pages I already had, some museum board. So 500 SEK felt fair for a friend, maybe even generous. Then I actually tracked the time. Tearing and arranging is slow. Letting things sit and come back to them. I ended up at about 14 hours from start to finish. That's roughly 35 SEK an hour. About 3 euros. Less than a coffee in this city. I'm not angry about it. She's a friend and I'm glad I made it. But I realised I have absolutely no instinct for what my time is worth. I undershoot every time. I think because the materials are cheap I assume the whole thing should be cheap. But the materials are cheap because I spent years learning where to find them and how to use them. That's not nothing.

walked into a gallery opening last week, guy comes up, says he's been watching my stuff online. my heart's pounding because holy shit someone noticed. then he says "your work has so much raw energy but you'd sell three times as much if you just... pulled it back a little. make it more accessible." i stood there holding my wine and wanted to cry and punch him at the same time. accessible. like what i'm doing is too MUCH. like the whole point is to make people comfortable. i spent years learning how to stop making polite art. i grew up in a house where we didn't talk about what was actually happening and i painted that way for so long, safe, quiet, looking good on the surface. i taught myself to tear that open and now someone wants me to smooth it back down so it matches their couch. i told him no and he gave me this little pity smile like i'd made a business mistake. maybe i did. don't care. art that doesn't cost you anything isn't worth looking at. i'll keep painting the ugly honest stuff even if it hangs in my hallway forever 🔥

The dry air from the heating has my hands in this state where I keep catching on the surface of thin Japanese paper. Tiny little tears where I just want a clean edge. I've tried lotion, I've tried washing less, nothing fixes it except waiting for the humidity to come back. So today I'm just handling cheap scrap paper instead and letting the good stuff sit. A whole day of making do because of dry hands. Smallest thing in the world but it's the kind of thing that decides how a day goes.

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