I had a deck of the Wicked cards out last week. Official ones, green heavy, lots of the character faces. I shuffled it properly, filmed the whole thing like always, then started laying them out on the board. Halfway through a whole run of hearts landed together and the joker sat right in the middle of them. Looked almost staged. It wasn’t.

I nearly pulled the cards off and started again. Then I stopped. The whole point is that I don’t get to rearrange after the shuffle. If I start picking which cards stay and which move, the piece stops being the thing I claim it is. So it stayed. The green background I painted behind it made the cluster even louder. Some people will like that weight in the centre, some won’t. I don’t know yet which one I am.

This happens more than people realise. The Inimitable boards and the Fantasy ones are all done the same way. Premium deck, real shuffle, every card fixed by hand onto the A1 rigid board. No prints later. Once its glued its the only version. Curators who have seen the work in person usually clock that the irregularities are genuine. You can see where the card edges sit slightly proud or where one corner took more glue. Its not a print pretending to be texture.

I still walk around London shows and see how many artists smooth everything out. Nothing wrong with that. My boards just keep the small accidents. If someone is looking for work that still carries the moment it was made, rather than a cleaned-up version of it, these are the ones in the studio.