We mailed the first edition in a paper sleeve we cut by hand. Eighteen prints, each numbered in pencil, each addressed to someone who had said yes to a project that did not yet exist. The night we sealed them, the loft smelled of fixative and overheated kettle. Nothing about it felt like the beginning of anything.
A decade on, we still pull the first proof of every edition by hand. The studio is bigger now, the kettle is the same. Our collectors are scattered across forty-one countries; some of them have grown children since they bought their first piece. The rituals stay because they are the only honest way we know to make this work.
On pacing, and on patience
Our pace has been called many things — slow, deliberate, occasionally infuriating. We've been told we should ship more, mint faster, sell harder. We've also been told the opposite, by people who would like us to release one piece a year and then disappear. We have tried to listen to neither and to ourselves instead.
An edition is a promise that the work is finished. Sending it out before it is finished breaks the only promise that matters.
What we have learned, in ten years, is that the people who care about the work are the people who notice the pace. They notice when a release is rushed. They notice when a print is signed under fluorescent light at three in the morning instead of at the easel in the late afternoon. They do not always say so, but they always know.
What we got wrong
Plenty. We have shipped pieces that should have stayed in the drawer for another season. We have priced editions in ways that excluded the people we most wanted to reach. We have, at least once, lost a print in transit and pretended for an entire afternoon that we hadn't, because we were too embarrassed to call the collector and admit it.
We are getting better. Slowly. The way most things get better.
What's next
More of the same, in slightly different rooms. A few new artists whose work has been quietly remaking the way we look at light. A new partnership with a paper mill outside Kyoto that we have been visiting in our heads for years. A field notes series, written from the road, about places where art is made for reasons that have nothing to do with markets.
Mostly: we will keep showing up. That, more than anything, is what a decade of editions has taught us. The work is the long thing. The community is the long thing. Everything else is weather.
— Hannah Lee, Founder & Curator
