Much has happened in the last three weeks. Twelve months of graft came to a head with the opening of Edgelands where all manner of people from my current and past lives met for two hours in what an artist neighbour described to me today as a very good atmosphere, then melted away again. I have previously written about how surreal that seemed. That was closely followed by Lesley Dolphin having me as a sofa guest on the wireless where she actively promoted the Museum of East Anglian Life and my exhibition.
Even closer on the heeels of that was the departure of Mrs O’s mother from this earth plain and all the consequent activities and arrangements. Then it was the second PV for trustees and benefactors of the Museum.

In between all this third party organisations pumped out copy on the exhibition to a huge audience and the exhibition was also listed in the Guardian Guide on 1st August. Couple that with the verbal and written feedback from all manner of lay people and artists of all types and I can truly say that this exhibition was worth it.

I get it that some people will not get it. That has always been a given. I also get it that some people will initially react to it superficially but on the whole I have heard nothing but 99.9% support for the show and the messages it conveys. This is no singular message exhibition. There are layers of discovery and interpretation and it is up to the reader to strip those bare. In some ways, being constrained to Scottish Museum standards with regard to height of hang and content of panels, it made me strip the written messages back to the bone. That was quite hard to do but in many ways has made the work more approachable.

I suppose I have always been a rebel. All through my many and varied career paths I have challenged authority and been in authority so that that presented a challenge in balancing what it was that I was delivering in all those phases of my working life. I made rules, I broke and break rules. I drafted legislation for the 1994 Finance Act. I wrote in English. I received gobbledegook back from Parliamentary Counsel that to this day still reads like Double Dutch. I was the BA on the team that brought in Landfill Tax. This has filtered through into this exhibition as back in 1997 I jokingly changed the Project Initiation Document to read ‘Landfill tax – A Fly-Tippers Charter’. This I can assure you did not go down very well with my managers but how true it has turned out to be. That is one of my many messages in one of the 5 very large Large Format prints in the exhibition.

The other messages are that even the detritus of our use and abuse of our environment can actually look beautiful in the right light and even the format of camera I use to make the work influences the outcome. The same scene on medium format of a sombre large format subject can in fact look quite cheerful and to this end I believe that this body of work presents multiple viewpoints that will satisfy readers on many levels from the uninitiated to the environmentally and photographically educated although this has been pitched so that the former can grasp a message and take it home. I think this fits in with my membership of the Contemporary Group at the Royal Photographic Society. Essentially I am just a photographer and I don’t really like labels such as Street/Wedding/Landscape/ Portrait. I just take and make photographs usually on a project or themed basis and that is something I shall continue to do.

The Contemporary group sits comfortably with my rebellious streak in that there are really no rules other than the message is that what my work is about something. In this case it is about many things and not immediately obvious.

I have been gifted with the friendship of some very good local and nationally acclaimed photographers and artists and I’m looking forward to producing new Edgelands work that will grow out of a possible collaboration with Kate Jackson artist/musician. This will introduce more structures into my work. I find that working with artists in a local collective at the Freudian Sheep opens my mind to other ideas and ways of seeing. I just paint with the light in my cameras what their input has opened my eyes to. I am not a club person. I started off there but as has been reported in major laboratory blogs about my work, the photographer or any artist for that matter endures a lonely existence that culminates now and again in work going on a wall or in a book that attracts interaction from others.

The people who have given me most support in this venture are those with nothing to give but support. I value that and the unconstrained worlds they live in.