LAST CHANCE TO READ?

Farewell #27

(with apologies to e.j. thribb)

So, farewell town centre gallery

That’s been our home

This last four weeks

Well, that’s enough of that…..

We thought we were here ‘til the 7^th August but the wheels of Commerce grind ever on and new paying tenants want this space.

There’ll soon be a new store in this spot and in August neo:artists will be opening a new gallery down the mall (the old Next store) and presenting the Print Prize 2016 exhibition but in the meantime there’s no room for us at the inn so it’s ‘Goodnight and Goodbye’ for “Allotted”.

Yesterday evening was hectic, we had to produce a ‘Last Chance to See….’ Press Release to tell as many people as possible that this coming weekend will be the final opportunity to see “Allotted”, we had to email participants to ask them to come in and help dismantle the exhibition next week, and we had to contact people we’d invited to come along in the last two weeks to tell them we won’t be here. And in the medium term David is going to have to find the right way to tell the sponsors that the six week exhibition they funded turned out to be for four weeks only.

Abas may be able to help us put on something very limited at the Bolton Onion, Leek and Vegetable Show, maybe display and hopefully sell, a few prints and the writers’ booklet. Because a show like “Allotted” is also a sales opportunity for the artists, and two weeks of potential sales has just gone.

We (Robert and David) had started to plan the final thoughts (the one that would have gone up on August 5^th). It would have featured David’s cartoon of a hard-up and homeless poet, sitting begging on the pavement with his sign ‘Will rhyme for cash’. As with all David’s cartoons the poet looked very like him. But there hasn’t been time to finish it. Maybe we’ll keep the blog going. Maybe we’ll put the cartoon on the blog with the poet surrounded by piles of unsold copies of “the back of the seed packet”.

It’s been an interesting project, but for now, the party’s over (and other clichés)…

Whither (or should it be wither) the Slug Society now?

So here we end “Gallery Thoughts” and (if you have been) thank you for reading them

Robert Eldon

David Jackson

22.05.2016