As it is seen – open!
Exhibition now open!
AS IT IS SEEN
MELANIE STIDOLPH
7 – 29 OCT 2022
WED – SAT / 10 – 4
Talks programme at Grays Wharf:
Saturday 22nd October, 3pm
Mandy Lee Jandrell, artist and Director of Institute of Photography and Falmouth School of Art, Falmouth University in conversation with Melanie Stidolph.
Saturday 29th October, 3pm
Come and hear Yvonne John author of ‘Dreaming of a Life Unlived: Intimate Stories and Portraits of Women Without Children’. Yvonne is a graduate of Gateway Women (GW) year-long Plan B Mentorship programme and is a trained facilitator of the GW reignite weekend workshops.
Book for talks at Grays Wharf website.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
‘As it is seen’ finds a visual and poetic language for the artist’s experience of involuntary childlessness through two bodies of work.
A series of photographic works titled ‘Last Summer’ present scenes outside the artist’s direct experience. The works show families with young children at the edge of the sea. They focus on how we arrange ourselves and signal to others when we or they are in unfamiliar territory. These photographs look at the shape of groups and how togetherness is demonstrated through gestures and distance.
Stidolph says:
The slow observational process of creating the work is a form of healing; as I took the first shot of what has become a series, I realised it was the first time in a long time I could look long enough to compose a photograph, rather than look away from a family scene I could not recreate in my own life.
The exhibition will launch Stidolph’s first photo book: Endless Reproduction which shares a perspective of a journey to being childless not by choice.
From the Epigraph to the book:
2022. Cornwall, home. Twenty two years after having children became a focused ambition. I spent years in the mind of my imagined near future – trying to will an increasingly distant life closer to me, whilst trying to hold myself in the present.
The book is available from the gallery and direct from the artist’s website.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a free publication featuring an essay about Stidolph’s practice by writer Lizzie Lloyd ‘A body, in parts, interjects’ commissioned by Cultivator Cornwall, a response to the work ‘Endless Reproduction’ by Paola Paleari, curator and writer, and an interview with the artist by Stefanie Braun, freelance curator, commissioned by Photomonitor.
This exhibition is part of a new programme at Grays Wharf supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.