Edgelands is a very personal ongoing project, which has been an attempt to come to terms with the changing nature of home, and the memories that surround it. It is set in a working-class neighbourhood 7 miles to the North of Manchester, on the threshold of urban areas and the countryside. As a family, we have always felt that we existed on the fringes – that we didn’t quite fit in with anyone around us. The biggest house on an un-adopted gravel street of terraces made us a little too posh for the neighbours, but then my parents distinctly working-class background also made us a little too common to feel at home anywhere else.

The project is therefore about existing on the edges. It is about the peculiarities of an individual family that doesn’t quite fit in. Our home is on the edge of the city, the threshold of change between the town of Oldham and the city of Manchester. On the other edge is the tough and bleak landscape of the moors, and the rolling countryside. The houses quickly change from a distinct red Accrington brick to the rough-hewn sandstone of weavers cottages, and we look out to views of an old gothic church, the cotton mills that brought wealth to the town in the 19th century, and the distant stone watchtower on the hills beyond.

It is a landscape of reservoirs, crumbling mills, foggy moors, off licences, and rows and rows of brick terraces.

I wanted to describe the essence of this place, and also the strong emotions and memories baked into everyday life. Thus, the series combines family portraits with scenes of the local area. Many of the portraits have been slightly staged – in order to emphatically display what these moments of home felt like to me. Objects and characters have been carefully placed in a scene, or the lighting has been controlled. I would see it as a sort of narrative driven journalism; it’s not quite truthful, maybe it’s a subjective truth based on emotion, or a truth that goes beyond reality.

I Realised that these photographs were an attempt to capture so many fleeting moments of change. My parents were getting older and more fragile, my sister was getting older and becoming more distant, I was getting older and becoming more lost. Then the house itself, the one that me and my sister grew up in, was so deeply loaded with memories, painful and joyous.

The staging of the portraits and family scenes ultimately describes a family that never really was. In this way, it is a melancholic series - I capture a place that is changing and disappearing, but also a vision of a place that only ever existed in our minds.