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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'm curious how a first gallery connection really happens for people. Mine was almost embarrassingly unglamorous. After years of sending polite portfolios into what felt like a void, a small botanical gallery took me on because I'd delivered a commissioned piece to a neighbouring framer and the owner happened to see me carrying it through the door. She asked to look, and that was that. All the careful mailing, and it was a coincidence on a Tuesday afternoon. Was anyone's first gallery a deliberate strategy, or did most of you stumble into it the way I did? I teach a class on this and I'd rather tell students the truth about how it actually works than the tidy version.

I've been doing the whole "wake up, post a nice finished piece, tag materials, use hashtags, be consistent" thing for months and it's been working okay but like... okay. Then last week I was in a really bad mood about a painting I'd been fighting with for three days, the wash was drying wrong, everything was lifting when I went back in, and I just filmed myself scraping the whole thing off with a palette knife and going "well, that's going in the bin" and posted it on a whim. No caption strategy. Just pure frustration. That stupid, messy, nothing video has more saves and shares than anything I've posted in the last two months. And it's not even a good video, it's just real. I've had four commissions come through from it, including one from someone who said "I don't know anything about art but I felt that." I keep hearing we're supposed to "provide value" and "educate" and I'm not against that but I think maybe the value is just... letting people see you fail? In real time? Without making it a tidy lesson? I don't know, I'm still trying to figure out if I can be that messy on purpose or if it only works when it's genuine. Anybody else finding that the stuff you almost didn't post is the stuff that works?

Listed a piece I nearly didn't photograph because I thought it was too raw. Charcoal smeared where I meant it to stay clean, torn photo edges showing, the whole thing kind of falling apart the way I usually try to hide. Put it up anyway last Tuesday with a caption that was basically "this one fought me." Sold in under 24 hours to someone who sent a message about their own mother's handwriting being the same as the one in the found photo. I didn't even notice the handwriting matched anything. I just pulled the photo because the dress in it looked like one my brother's first girlfriend wore. Every time I try to predict what lands, I'm wrong. The polished landscape pieces I actually thought would go sit there for months. This one, the one that felt like letting someone see the workbench mid-mess, gone like that. Makes me wonder how much of my process is just me tidying things that people would've liked fine as they were.

There was a print fair in Leipzig two weekends ago, small, mostly German editions dealers and a few of us artists. I brought thirty etchings, three editions, and I had this spreadsheet before I went, mentally, about which ones to push because they did well on Instagram. The "engagement" ones, the moody close-ups people save. You know what sold? Not those. It was the piece I almost didn't pack, a silly little riso of a basil plant, because someone's grandmother in Bologna might have grown basil and it made them laugh. Three people stopped just to tell me it reminded them of a kitchen. One bought it. I keep thinking about that gap. The internet told me people wanted the dark architectural work. The room told me they wanted a basil plant and five minutes of talking about their nonna. I've been optimizing for the wrong audience because the online one is the only one that gives me numbers. The fair gave me 600 visitors on a Sunday and I learned more than a year of analytics. Not sure I have a tidy solution. Just noticing that the algorithm has quietly become my gallerist and I'm not sure I hired it.

I had a gallerist once tell me my etchings were "very nice, very craft", the way you'd praise a child for a tidy bedroom. Said it while looking at the most conceptual piece in the room. I still think about it. It taught me more about how they saw printmaking than anything they actually said. What's the most backhanded thing anyone in a gallery has said about your work? The one that made you smile and seethe at the same time.

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 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.

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 piece in a group show last spring. Small gallery, decent neighborhood foot traffic. They took 40% commission. That's fine, I know the deal, rent's real. But I also had to pay for my own framing. Print the postcards myself. Supply the wine for the opening. They asked if I could "activate my network" on social and tag them in stories every day leading up to it. So I'm paying to make the work, paying to present it, doing their marketing for them, and they take 40% of whatever sells. And I walked away thinking I was lucky to be there. I don't have a tidy conclusion. I'm still trying to figure out which part of this is normal and which part is getting played. Because I keep hearing about how the model is broken for artists but I don't see a lot of alternatives that aren't just "go viral on tiktok" which is its own kind of nonsense.

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've been mixing the same terre verte and lead white for three days trying to get a shadow on a white tablecloth right. This morning I scraped the whole thing off in frustration and started again. The palette ends up this mess of grey-greens and dirty creams, paint built up at the edges, turps everywhere. My husband came in and said "are you okay in here" like he was checking on a hostage situation. But the thing is, when the palette looks like that, when it's genuinely ugly and you don't care because you're inside the problem, that's when the painting starts to come right. The nice tidy palettes are for people who haven't started yet.

Okay, the glazing station is basically a crime scene. I have three buckets with murky water, like, a week's worth of brushes in various stages of 'drying' (read: crusty), and there's this one specific shade of blue glaze that has somehow gotten onto EVERYTHING. My apron, my hands, the shelf, probably my hair. I swear, I try to be tidy, vale? But then I get lost in mixing colors and things just... happen. Anyone else's creative space look like a Jackson Pollock painting after a mud fight?

Seriously, paper scraps everywhere, pastel dust is settled on every surface like a fine layer of grey snow. My easel is covered in about five layers of different sketches for the same nose I can't get right. Coffee mug rings on my desk too. It's not pretty, but it feels like mine, you know? The chaos is part of the process, I suppose. Still, maybe tomorrow I'll attempt some sort of tidy-up. Maybe.

tell me the real reason you started. not the tidy bio answer, the actual one. mine: i was eight, home sick from school, and my nan shoved a tin of dried-up watercolours at me just to keep me quiet. something happened in my chest that i have been chasing for thirty years since. what's yours

A few months back I got tired of hearing myself say that social media doesn't matter, so I did the thing I said I'd never do. I paid one of those agencies. Fifteen hundred euros for a month of "organic growth strategy." They sent me a plan that was basically: post every day, use these hashtags, engage with bigger accounts, tell your story more. The only concrete change was that I started posting my work with the same three hashtags as everyone else, and my feed became a wall of pictures of paint that said nothing. I do have a story. It's just not a tidy one, and it doesn't fit in a caption alongside a grid flourish. I cancelled after three weeks. The one useful thing that came out of it was noticing I'd stopped enjoying preparing a canvas. That was never supposed to be content. That's the part I keep. So bof, lesson learned the expensive way, but at least the money bought me that clarity. What's actually working for you right now, or is everyone else also just shouting into the same three hashtags?

when i first moved into this space two years ago i was so annoyed about the windows. it's a basement unit and the only natural light comes from these little hopper windows at street level that just show a brick wall about three feet away. i thought i'd hate it forever. but there's something about a wall that close. you watch the light change on the brick across the day, how it goes from grey to gold to almost purple. in winter the frost traces the mortar lines. i see maybe six inches of sky if i press my face against the glass. it's enough. also no one can see in so i don't have to tidy up for an audience. there's a pile of stuff next to my table that's been there since august. i know where everything is.