On Thursday 31st March the first solo Edgelands show at the Museum of East Anglian Life comes to an end.

I have been asked to be in attendance from 1400 on Thursday to greet the last visitors to the show as part of a closing view. Later on I shall be showing guests of the High Sheriff around the exhibition before her awards ceremony in the marquee behind Abbot’s Hall.

254 days for a first solo exhibition is going some and I’m indebted to Lisa Harris for gifting me the two temporary exhibition spaces in a gem of a building. I have tried to visit the exhibition most weeks when I have been in Suffolk and I always enquired about visitors and how they heard about the show and sometimes I experienced genuine delight from visitors to the galleries at being being able to talk to the artist.

So much has happened since the show opened. I was taken aback at how far some people travelled to to attend the PV and the first really warm and balmy summer’s evening for a long while and at how they all materialised through the gate into the walled garden and slipped away like shadows a few hours later. Some of the guests at this event had not been in the same space for 36 years and that happened to be in a different part of Suffolk and then some escapees from a previous employment turned up and that reminded me of the good time we had as a group. The second PV for Trustees and other guests was also well attended only this time I did not know anyone.

Making work for Edgelands carries on however. I have been busy making new images these last few months but I may break my rules and start to make some images into an extended season to see how the aesthetic changes, and change it will. One change I have had to deal with is despatching my exposed Portra film to Sheffield for processing since the demise of my local Kodak lab, but then Sheffield has a tenuous link with the extended series of Edgelands in that I met Kate Jackson  during this show whilst I was visiting her show and we are talking about a collaboration. She treats Sheffield as a spiritual home in that she was in the Long Blondes there. She has just released her new album ‘British Road Movies‘ as Kate Jackson and the Wrong Moves and is going on tour to promote it so when all the hullabaloo has settled down and she is back in Bury St Edmunds we will no doubt be trying to put together something along the lines of my ‘agri-dustrial buildings’ development of Edgelands. Watch this space.

In the meantime, Envisage Books have prepared a  handmade Limited Edition Catalogue to go with the Closing View. I shall have some pre-Artist’s Proof copies for people to see and pre-order on Thursday. You may have wanted an image but had no space for it. Here you can have all 35 in one book.

I’ve enjoyed collaborating with Eddie Ephraums in the making of this catalogue/book. It is so so different from the usual layup on a web based tool and the attention to detail is second to none. Check his site out for inspiration.

The image above did not make it into the show but is part of the much bigger body of work that may go into a new book.