Back of an Envelope show: 17th & 18th September 2022, coinciding with the final weekend of #Artwave Festival.

Rachael Adams
Pam Aldridge
Jac Batey
Nikki Davison-Bowman
Louis T Fowler
Juneja Harsimran
Sharon Haward
Vincent Hawkins
Sheila Hay
Gretchen Heffernan
Robert Littleford
June Nelson
Richard Mark Rawlins
Angela Smith
Kiki Stickl
Pat Thornton
Sarah Welsby

Opening times: 11.00am – 4.00pm
Edgeland Modern, 13 Beach Road, Newhaven, East Sussex, BN9 0DA

The best ideas and inventions, so we are told, are often first jotted down on the ‘back of an envelope’… Why? Because there’s usually one to hand and these ideas – often so fugitive – need capturing before they get lost.

Our Back of an Envelope ‘Open Call’ was inspired by Margaret Mellis’ popular exhibition at Towner Eastbourne earlier this year. Her later work incorporated the use and requisition of found objects, including envelopes: utilising and reimagining the shapes and forms they offered. The artist/curation team Edgeland Modern also explored the possibilities of using the Backs of Envelopes in 2019 in their first exhibition. And historically, the poet Emily Dickinson would invariably note the first few lines of a new poem on the back of an envelope, often writing along the perimeter of the flaps adding extra nuance to the meaning of the words.

Social media provided us with a huge potential audience and resulted in a wonderful response. Submissions came from far and wide with many takes on the Envelope as format, often reusing and recontextualizing naturally occurring postage paraphernalia.

The exhibition provided us with the opportunity to show how the found page, the torn edge, the postmark, the public and the private surface of the envelope can be creatively used.