This piece went through twenty nine versions before it had a name, and I left it as Untitled the whole way, which was deliberate. I only titled it once I could see what it had been doing. Out of register is a printing term. It describes a sheet where the plates have not lined up, where one color sits a fraction off the one beneath it and you read the gap before you read the image. Once I had the phrase I could not unsee it, because nothing in this piece agrees with anything else. That disagreement is the piece.

What you are looking at is a field of banded blocks, printed oversized and pushed off centre, so the sheet never carries the whole of it. You get a crop of something that plainly keeps going past all four edges. No join lands cleanly on a block edge, so the field reads as continuous rather than as a grid, and every block has turned on its own. Some sheets fall into rows of unequal height, some are split and split again until the grid stops being a grid at all, and a few give the whole page over to four enormous fields, each winding into its own off centre eye. The order is there. It is just never allowed to close.

The colour will not sit still either. A sheet opens in one palette and has completely become a second by the bottom, and the change arrives block by block rather than as a wash laid over the top, the way a printer runs out of one ink and starts mixing the next. Some sheets are then dipped. One edge goes into the colour, crooked more often than square, and everything below the tide line takes it together. Across most sheets a band crosses the whole picture, arriving from off the page and leaving again, and its one real question is what it does about the frame: pass under it and let the picture hold it, ride over it and off the sheet entirely, or do one at each end, which is the strangest of the three and the reason it exists.

The paper is not a backdrop. It is part of the picture, and I compose it as hard as I compose the field. Every sheet has a torn deckle edge, a border ruled in pen or chalk or graphite, and a margin holding colour swatches, registration marks, an ink test. Most sheets are signed, with a carved chop or a pressed stamp, and some are not signed at all. None of that is there as evidence of anything. The margin is where the sheet breathes, and the marks in it are colour and interval and weight, the same as everything inside the border. The border is where the title lives most literally, because the ruled line sits a fraction off the sheet's true grid, a sub degree rotatioaand a couple of pixels. Ruled dead true it goes dead. Then the ageing comes over the whole sheet, foxing and crinkle and a veil of faint strands, and that is not there to make the paper look old either. It is the last colour decision in the piece, the one that pulls everything else into the same air.

A great deal of this piece is defined by what came out of it. Over the run I built and then deleted whole layers: drawn line work across the field, repairs laid over the damage, creases where the sheet had been folded, holes worn clean through, a folded corner with its ghost flap. Every one of them worked, several of them I liked, and they all went, because the sheet kept getting busier and the piece is better quiet. What is left is an image that refuses to line up with itself and holds together anyway, which is the only thing I was ever chasing. It all comes out of a single number, and it is vector to the last shape, so it holds at any size, a screen or a wall.