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I dropped off a completed study at a framer yesterday. Small hawthorn branch, done on 300gsm paper I'd stretched and let dry for the better part of two days. Handed it over with explicit instructions: do not trim, do not crop, mat it as-is. Came back today and he'd taken the tiniest sliver off the bottom edge. A millimeter, maybe less. He was genuinely proud of it, said it "balanced the margins better." I stood there looking at the sheet. The signature. My signature was on that trimmed edge. He had cut through my name. Some people will tell you it's nothing, that a millimeter is nothing, that he was just trying to help. But I drew right up to that edge on purpose. The whole composition depended on that lower margin being what it was. And now the piece isn't what I signed, which means I can't in good conscience call it mine anymore. I took it home and I'll redo the whole study. A day and a half of work, gone, because someone assumed his eye was better than mine. I've learned to check every single thing I hand over to someone else. The collectors who want me to "fix" things, the framers who want to improve them. I am so tired of being the only person in the room who treats my own work as finished.

spent my whole Sunday morning on three mugs i should've trimmed in an hour. clay was too soft, kept collapsing every time i got cocky with the tool, so i'd wait, come back, start again. by the third one i just put on a podcast and gave in to the pace. the one good thing is i've learned to read the leather-hard better now. you feel it in the first pass, that little give. i used to rush it because i hated waiting around for clay to set and now i'm starting to think the waiting is half the skill. anyway the mugs look fine. wonky but fine, which is basically my whole brand. the kiln will have the final word thursday. 🫠

I've had these old Wiss scissors since I was maybe twelve years old. They was my grandmother's before that, she used 'em to cut patterns and rip seams and trim threads for I don't know how many years. The handles was that old black rubber that gets sticky after a while, but they cut true right up till this morning. I was trimming the binding on a quilt I'm finishing and the little screw that holds 'em together just... gave out. Dropped right onto the floor. I sat there holding the two pieces like they was a little bird that died in my hand. You know how it is with a tool that's been with you that long. It ain't just the tool. It's her hands on it before mine. It's every quilt I made with these things, baby quilts for my children, my grandchildren, a wedding quilt for my niece, the one I made when my husband passed and I didn't know what else to do with my hands. All of it in those blades. I tried to see if I could get 'em fixed but the metal's worn thin where the screw goes through. They're done. I don't know if I'm more sad about losing the scissors or losing that little piece of her I still had in my hands every day. Gonna have to break in a new pair and hope they carry some of the same memory forward. That's the way of it, I suppose. Tools wear out. What they helped you make stays.🙏

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.

ok so i spent three days on this little sculptural vase, handbuilt, textured surface, this glaze combo i've been testing for weeks. really proud of it. posted a reel of the process, lighting nice, good music, the whole thing. got maybe 300 views. then yesterday i posted a story of my cat sitting in a bisqueware bowl i forgot to trim down. phone footage, bad lighting, my thumb in the corner for half of it. 4.2k views. 14 dms asking if the bowl is for sale. i don't know what the game is anymore. i'm not even mad, just... confused. like the algorithm has decided my cat is the artist now and i'm just the assistant who cleans the kiln.

I got a pair of sewing scissors that belonged to my grandmother, she carried them in her apron pocket my whole childhood and I'd watch her snip thread and cut fabric and trim little corners off pieced blocks, never setting them down, just keeping them right there at her hip like they was part of her. She passed in '84 and I got those scissors and honey they are dull as all get out and I don't care one bit. I could get them sharpened, I know I could. But it feels wrong somehow, like I'd be erasing the wear she put in them. Every little nick and gap in the blade is from her hand. My daughter bought me a nice new pair for Christmas two years ago and they sit in the drawer. I use them when I have to. But when I'm really working, when I'm piecing something that feels like it matters, I reach for Mamie's scissors every time. They pull at the fabric more than they cut it sometimes. And that's alright with me. Anybody else got a tool they keep using past when they should? Or am I just being sentimental?

Some guy at the market last weekend watched me centre clay for like ten minutes, clearly had no idea what was happening, and then pointed at a wet cylinder on the wheel and asked if I could "just add a handle" to it. Like, yeah bro, sure, I'll just reach through time and space and slap a handle on this thing that hasn't been trimmed or fired or anything. You want a mug? That's a whole journey, not an Uber Eats order. I said "it's a bit early for that" and he looked at me like I was being difficult. Honestly the confidence people have about a craft they've never touched is incredible. I wish I had that energy about literally anything. Imagine walking into a kitchen and telling the chef to just add some saffron to the thing that's still raw in the mixer.

There's this old bungalow on Convent Road, the kind with a deep verandah and blue trim and a neem tree that must be a hundred years old. I sketched it first in 2021, just passing by. Did a proper watercolour in 2022. Came back last month and it was still standing, the gate was open so I sat on the steps and painted it again, trying to be faster, looser, less attached maybe. It's gone now. I walked past yesterday and it's just rubble and a JCB parked on top of it. I don't know why I'm posting this in wins except, I caught it three times. That's three more paintings than I'd have if I'd just shrugged and walked past. I keep thinking that's what I'm here for really, just catching things before they disappear. It's not sad exactly. It's what I do.

A museum shop in Vienna picked up a small edition of my screenprints for their retail. I was thrilled, museum shop, right, that feels like validation. They paid €150 per print, wholesale. I sold them 20. I did the math yesterday because I was avoiding something else. Each print takes me about four hours from exposure to final trim, not counting the drawing time before that, not counting the screens I burned and then rejected, not counting the test proofs. So €150 for roughly six hours of work per print if I'm being generous about what counts as labour. That's €25 an hour if nothing goes wrong. Something always goes wrong. I'm not saying the museum shop ripped me off. That's just the going rate, they were fine to deal with. But I sat there thinking: I have an MFA, I've been doing this fifteen years, and I'm making €25 an hour selling to an institution that will mark it up to €400 and call it affordable art. And I said yes because I was flattered they asked. I don't know what the right number is. I just know that the gap between what feels good for the ego and what's actually sustainable keeps getting wider and I keep choosing the ego.

I still make my own brushes from neem twigs sometimes. Not always, I have proper ones also, from the city, my son brought me. But for the very fine line work, the kind you see on the border of a Sita kalyan painting, nothing works quite like the neem twig brush. You chew the end soft, shape it with your teeth, then trim it. My grandmother could make one in two minutes without even looking. I still cannot do it like her. But I try. When I am using a store brush I feel something missing. The twig brush, it does not hold so much colour. You have to dip again and again. But the line, thin like a hair, steady. The hand remembers. Yesterday I broke one I was making. The wood split wrong. I sat there a while just looking at it. Then I went outside and found another twig.🙂

there's a pair of kitchen scissors i stole from my ex-husband's apartment four years ago that i use for everything, cutting paper, trimming thread, opening packages of charcoal, cutting my own hair in a pinch. they're the worst scissors for art. not sharp, the pivot is loose, they leave a ragged edge on everything. i have three actual proper pairs of scissors within arm's reach right now. i reach for the bad kitchen ones every single time. i think about this more than makes sense. like, am i punishing the material? or is it that i learned to work around them and now the ragged edge is part of the process? or i just like that they're mine in a way nothing else in this room is mine. anyway. the paper i'm cutting right now looks like it's been chewed by something. i'm leaning into it.