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I keep the tide table pinned above my worktable. Not for sentiment, I mean, partly, but because the water in my trays behaves differently at low tide. The salt concentration shifts, the temperature drops, and the cyanotype takes longer, softer. I can feel it in my hands before I check the chart. My father used to read the tide the way other people read the news. He'd step outside, look at the sky, sniff the air, and just know. I never got that. I need the printed numbers. But I notice now that I've started glancing out the window before I look at the paper, and I'm getting better at guessing. The studio smells like brine and fixer and wet wool today. Rain coming. The low tide is at 16:23. I'll start coating paper now so it's ready when the light goes.

I print by the tide these days. Not by the light exactly, that too, but by the actual state of the water. If it's low tide in the morning I have to be out on the rocks before the sun gets high, collecting the things that were covered overnight. Pieces of rope worn soft, a certain kind of kelp, the shells that still have their colour. Then back to print while they're still wet from the sea. It means my studio hours are different every week. Some days I'm working at six. Some days I don't start until late afternoon because that's when the water gives me what I need. It makes a mess of any routine I try to keep. But the prints are better. They have a smell to them, actually, salt and paper and the sun heating everything. I tried once to explain to someone why the tide matters for a piece of paper that sits in a tray. I couldn't find the words. But I keep doing it.

I used to check the time. Now I check the tide tables more than the clock on the wall. High tide this morning was at 7:44, I was already down there with a jar, because the water behaves differently an hour either side of the turn. Rougher, more suspended, it carries different things. I've been bringing buckets of seawater back to the studio and using it straight away, same day, while it's still got whatever it picked up. The prints come out different every time. Salt content changes the wash, particles settle into the paper, sometimes there's a tiny piece of bladderwrack stuck to the edge that I leave there because it feels like the sea left its signature. My partner says I smell like low tide when I come home. I don't mind. It's the closest I can get to developing prints in the Atlantic itself without the paper floating away.<｜end▁of▁thinking｜>

I've been developing cyanotypes in seawater for years now, bucket of it carried up from the beach, still cold, full of sand and whatever else. But today the tide was high and I thought, just try it. Hold the paper in the actual water, let the wave wash over it. Held it by one corner. Second wave ripped it right out of my hand. Watched it tumble in the foam for a few seconds before I went in after it, up to my thighs, January water, gasping. Got it back. Ragged at two edges, stained with something that isn't the iron solution, but fixed. It's drying now pinned to the studio wall with the tear showing. Might be the best print I've made this year. Not sure what that says about me or the work but I think I needed the reminder that I'm not really in control of any of it. The water decides.

I used to write these careful captions about cyanotype chemistry, the UV exposure times, the pH of the seawater I develop in. Thought people needed to understand the craft to appreciate the print. Then I posted a photo of a print that went completely wrong, overexposed, paper curled, the blue almost black, the seaweed I'd placed shifting mid-exposure so the whole thing was a ghost. I wrote "The sun moved and so did I. This one belongs to the Atlantic now." It got more engagement than any of my tidy process posts. People commented about their own ruined things, the work they'd abandoned, the projects that fell apart. A gallery owner in Amsterdam messaged me asking if I had more "failures" available. I don't think people want to understand how it's made. I think they want to feel that they're allowed to make mistakes too. So now I show the ones that didn't work, alongside the ones that did. The studio floor after a bad week. The prints I fished out of the tide at the wrong moment. The work sells the same. But the conversations are different.

I do the Saturday market in town maybe twice a month, rest of the time it's online. And every time I come back from the market I look at the Instagram numbers and just laugh. At the stall, I can put out ten different prints, hares, herons, the round tower at Kilmacduagh, a new linocut of the Claddagh at low tide, and watch people pick things up and put them down. And what sells is never what I think will sell. Never. The one I carved in two hours on a whim because I was bored? Gone in the first hour. The one I spent three weeks on, re-carved twice, perfect registration? Sits there like a nun at a wedding. Last month a woman bought the scrappy little print of a jackdaw I nearly didn't bring. She said it looked like the ones that raid her bins at home. And I'm sitting there thinking, I can't algorithmically optimise for "reminds you of a bin-raiding jackdaw." The real numbers I trust are: did someone laugh, did someone say "that's himself exactly," did someone pull out a crumpled twenty from their back pocket. The rest of it feels like astrology for people who make things.

Took me three weeks to get back into the studio proper after Christmas. You know the way, kids back to school, chest infection going round, the whole place damp and cold and the ink was like treacle. Kept finding reasons to just tidy the bench instead of cutting. Anyway last night I finally pulled a proof of a block I started in November. Big heron, neck curved down, standing in that shallow water you get on the Corrib at low tide. First proof was rank, cut too deep in the wing feathers, lost the line. Had the whole thing sitting there mocking me. Pulled a second proof at half eleven last night with a different black and a lighter touch on the roller. And the missus came down to see what I was at, coffee in hand, looked at it drying on the rack, and said "that's grand now, that's a nice one." For her that's the highest praise you'll get. No fuss. Took herself back up to bed. Sometimes you just need to get through the bad version to find the good one. And a "that's grand" off someone who's seen every failed print you've ever made. That'll do.

I had a newsletter for almost two years. Every two weeks, a studio note, what I was printing, the tide tables that week, a dried piece of seaweed I pressed between pages. Nothing pushy. Just the work. I stopped six months ago. Not because of open rates or unsubscribes. Because I realised I was writing for an audience I couldn't feel. The emails went out and something went into a void and maybe someone read them somewhere and maybe they didn't. I had no way to tell. I know the advice. Build your list. Own your platform. But I think there's something honest about admitting that not every kind of reach is worth having. The newsletter worked better on paper than it ever did in my gut. I've been quieter online since then. Posting less. Selling more through the people who find me through word of mouth and the local shop that carries my prints. It's slower. It also doesn't feel like I'm feeding something that never looks back. Anyone else stopped doing something that was supposed to be essential and found it didn't matter?