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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 have printed the tidal tables for the month and pinned them above the desk. Everything arranges itself around them now. Which mornings I can walk out to the rocks with paper, when the water is low enough to reach the good seaweed, what hour the light is right on the tide pools. My partner asked what we're doing Saturday and I said, low tide at 14:17, and he didn't ask again. It's fine. It's fine because the paper needs the water and the water sets its own clock and my job is mostly to show up on time. But I caught myself once adjusting a dentist appointment around the neap tide and thought maybe this has gone past collaboration into something else. Still, there is nothing like the moment the paper touches seawater at the exact right level of salt. The blue decides itself. I just hold it down.

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｜>

For years I've rinsed my prints in the sea. Not always, but when the light is right I carry the paper down to the water and let the tide do the washing for me, the way I've always done it. This year the tide tables shifted somehow, or I did. I kept arriving at the water when it was already on its way out, so the prints came up half-bleached in spots where the foam worked them too long. There's something humbling about being told your timing is off by the ocean itself. No negotiating with that. I found myself missing the prints that failed the worst. One of them has this big pale scar across the middle where the water stayed too long, and it might be the truest thing I've made in months. I keep it pinned where I can see it. Wondering if I should start trusting the mistakes more than the plan. The sea seems to think so.

Left four cyanotypes face-up on the boardwalk by Matosinhos to dry in the sun, went off for a coffee and got talking, came back and the tide had already taken two of them. Not ruined, just gone, carried out somewhere into the Atlantic. The other two were soaked through with saltwater which honestly might have done them good. Everybody says oh no, your work. But I sat there a minute and thought, that's the process. I spend all year trying to get seawater onto paper and the sea just decides when it's ready. My grandmother used to say the sea takes what it wants, and she never meant it as a complaint. The ironic thing is the two it took were the best of the batch. Of course they were.

Set up thirty sheets on the rocks this morning, weighted with stones, the good glass held down with fishing net. Sun was perfect, low and honest. Then the sea did what the sea does and came in sooner than I planned. Watched the Prussian blue wash away, sheet by sheet, like the paper had never held anything at all. Some of them I'd coaxed for days. The seaweed pressed just so, the exposure timed to the morning light. I keep telling myself the ocean is the collaborator. Today it felt more like the editor. Cut everything I was too attached to, left me with the blank ones and the ones that turned a strange pale grey I don't recognise yet. I'll go back tomorrow. The tide won't ask my permission either way, and that's maybe the whole point.

I developed a photogram of a piece of net in seawater this week, which I do often, but I left it in longer than usual, maybe forty minutes, and the water crept up the paper unevenly and left a hard line across the middle where it stopped. Everything above it is pale, washed out, almost nothing. Below it the blue is deep and the net reads clearly. Two prints in one sheet, basically. I've been staring at it for three days. Part of me thinks the line is the whole point, that it says something about where the water reached and where it didn't, and I should stop trying to make it stop happening. The other part thinks I've just made a mistake and I'm dressing it up because I don't want to start again. What I keep coming back to is that I can't reproduce it. If I decide the line is the piece, I have about as much control over the next one as I do over the weather. And I'm not sure I'm honest enough with myself to know whether I like it or whether I'm tired. I've had prints where the accident was clearly a gift and I knew it straight away. This one I genuinely don't know. That's the part I'd like help with, if anyone has a way of telling the difference that isn't just waiting a month and hoping you feel differently.

I had a cyanotype on the drying rack for two weeks that I kept walking past and deciding was a failure. The seaweed had shifted mid-exposure, so the whole composition was off, the edges were uneven, the blue had pooled in one corner. Three times I nearly tore it up. Then the light hit it wrong one evening and I saw it. That shifted seaweed looked like the tide had moved through the paper. The pooling corner was exactly the way water sits on a rock at low tide. It's now the one print in the studio I won't sell. I keep it on the wall where the afternoon sun reaches it, just to remind myself that sometimes what I read as a mistake is the sun and the sea telling me what they had in mind all along.

Drove out to Matosinhos at six this morning with a box of paper I'd coated the night before, and did a run of six photograms on the flat rocks below the fish market, using the tide pools as my trays. Two came out. One of those is the best print I've made this year and I genuinely do not know why it worked, which is a strange thing to feel pleased about. I can tell you the paper was 300g Fabriano, coated a bit too thick, and the sun came through the haze for maybe ninety seconds of the exposure and then went. That is all I have. The other four are in the bin, and I'm not sorry about it. I think the thing I am actually happy about is that I stopped trying to repeat last spring's results. For months I was chasing a print I made in April, the same weed, same rock, same hour, and every one of them was a pale copy of a memory. Today I just put the paper down and let the sea do what it does. Anyway. Six sheets, two prints, one that might be something. The rest of the day is for sleeping in the sun like a cat.

For years I posted only the prints that came out clean. The ones where the fern held its shape, where the wash went even, where the paper didn't buckle at the edge. Nice squares, no mess. Then in February I ruined a whole batch. Too much sun, I left them out maybe twenty minutes too long and the whole thing went flat, no depth left in the blue at all. I photographed the worst one anyway and put it up. Just the ruin. No caption saying look at my process, nothing like that. More people wrote to me about that one print than about a year of the good ones. One woman in Galway asked if she could buy it. A man asked what tide I'd pulled the net from, which felt like the right question to be asked. I think people are tired of being shown the result. They want to see the hand that is not sure. I don't want to turn that into a formula either, because then it becomes another performance. But it changed how I think about what is worth putting into the world. I have three ruined sheets on the studio wall now. I like them more than the ones that worked. Not sure yet if that is a good sign or just me getting older.

Doing a big one, A2, a heron standing in the reeds at Ros an Mhíl with the tide half out. Took me three hours to get the water right and then I realised I'd put the bird standing in a spot no heron would ever stand, which meant carving the whole lower left corner back out and starting that section again. Course I only copped it after inking up. The proof is on the line drying now and there's a fat black smudge where I got impatient with the gouge, you can see daylight through the paper if you hold it up. Anyway. It's the third heron this year. I've one hare left in the edition from last spring and two of the herons are still in a drawer under the bench, wrapped in newsprint, because the market crowd want the small ones, the little 20 quid hares, and the big lads sit there looking at me every time I open the drawer. But I keep carving them. It's not even stubbornness at this point, it's just the only thing I actually want to be doing at half six in the morning before the house wakes up. The wife reckons I should do a run of cheap ones for the Christmas fair and I probably will. But I'm not doing it today.

Three buckets carried up from the beach this morning, still cold, a little grit in the bottom. People ask why I don't just mix salt into tap water and I never have a good answer, but it isn't the same. The sea at low tide has a particular smell, that iodine and green thing, and it carries whatever was floating out there that night. My prints pick up traces of it. Maybe not visible, but I know. My partner thinks I'm ridiculous, hauling seawater up the hill in a bucket at seven in the morning. He's not wrong. But there's something about developing a print in water that touched the same rocks my father's boat used to scrape past. It matters to me even if nobody else can see it. Today's batch turned out too dark. The sun came through the clouds wrong and I overexposed. I'll pour the water back into the sea when I'm done. It feels like returning the favor.

Beautiful morning for it, so I carried my coated papers down to the rocks before the sun got bold. Wind gusting, spray landing on the corners of three sheets. I left them anyway. The salt marks are part of the print now, little white freckles where the water sat on the emulsion before it dried. I didn't plan that. The sea did. I keep fighting this instinct to control everything. Sun time, water temperature, how long I leave the paper under. Then a day like today reminds me the whole point is I'm not in charge. I just hold the paper down. Developed them in seawater like always, and one came out lighter than I intended, almost faint, like a memory of a tide. I think it's my favourite. I'll sell the "correct" ones and keep that one. Almost forgot to eat lunch again. The winter swims keep me honest about that, at least.🙂

there was a proper layer of crystallised sea salt built up on the corner where i leave prints to dry after the seawater bath. i don't rinse them, the salt is part of the process, it catches different tones. but the table had gotten bad. crusty. white deposits on everything. so i scrubbed it down this morning and now the wood looks too clean. like a stranger's workspace. i keep glancing over at that corner expecting to see the tide mark and there's nothing. i think i need to go get it messy again on purpose. maybe that's the whole thing, you spend years building a rhythm of mess and then one day you tidy it and realise the mess was the point.

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've been making a series on the beach at Aguda since February. Same stretch, same black rocks, same two hours before the tide turns. What changed is that I started developing the sheets in seawater I carry up from there in a plastic can instead of the tap water in my studio. The prints come out softer, less certain of their own edges. I've been calling that a flaw in my head for four months. A woman bought one on Saturday. The one where the net drags across the top corner, the one I nearly threw away twice because the exposure went too long and the blue got so deep the weed reads almost black. She said it looked like something recovered from water rather than made. I stood there and took her money and said thank you and felt weirdly close to tears. I think the win is not the sale. It's that I stopped treating the sea as contamination in my own process. For years I've been correcting it out. Anyone else here sell the piece that embarrassed them a little? I don't mean the commissioned one. The one you almost didn't put in the folder.