Exhibition: As it is seen - Melanie Stidolph

Installation shot: Oliver Udy

As it is seen

Grays Wharf Gallery

MELANIE STIDOLPH
6 – 29 Oct 2022

‘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’ show scenes of families with young children at the edge of the sea. They focus on how we arrange ourselves and signal our belonging. These photographs look at the shape of groups and how togetherness is demonstrated through gestures and distance, our sense of which is heightened now after coming through the pandemic.

Stidolph says:
The slow observational process of creating the work is a form of healing; as I took the first shot, 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 scene I could not recreate in my own life.

The exhibition launches Stidolph’s first photo book: ‘Endless Reproduction’ which shares a perspective of a journey to being childless not by choice.

From the Epigraph:
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 exhibition is 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.

Click here to view a digital version of the publication.

This exhibition is part of a new programme supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Installation view

Opening night

Discussion with Mandy Lee Jandrell and Melanie Stidolph

Yvonne John talk

Discussion with Mandy Lee Jandrell and Melanie Stidolph

PUBLIC PROGRAMME AND RESOURCES

Download the exhibition publication here

GALLERY TALK / As it is seen
SAT 22 OCT 3PM
An informal conversation between Melanie Stidolph and artist and academic Mandy Lee Jandrell

Mandy Lee Jandrell is Director of the School of Art and The Institute of Photography at Falmouth University. She is an internationally exhibiting artist working with installation, photography and moving image. Her work has been shown in The Royal Academy, The South African National Gallery, The Whitechapel Gallery, The Serpentine Gallery and The Sharjah Art Foundation, amongst others.

Mandy Lee Jandrell and Melanie Stidolph have had an ongoing dialog about photography and have collaborated with each other on a number of projects over the last two decades. Over the course of their careers, both artists have used photography as a way to explore ideas around aesthetics, personal experience and the cultural production of meaning. Over time, the artists have developed a way of interrogating one another’s practice, as well as articulating and questioning each other’s ideas and experimental outcomes. Both share a desire to unsettle their existing ways of working and at times disrupt the coherence of the image.

TALK BY YVONNE JOHN
SAT 29 OCT / 3PM
An informal talk and discussion of the themes in the exhibition with Yvonne John.

Yvonne John is a British author and activist for the Childless women of colour. She is a public speaker who has appeared on numerous radio and television programmes, including BBC Radio 4’s ‘Woman’s Hour’. She is known as the leading voice for the women of colour’s experience around infertility, as well as creating an inclusive space for black women and women of colour to openly talk about their childless journey.

Yvonne is a graduate of Gateway Women’s Plan B Mentorship programme. Gateway Women is a support group for women who are childless by circumstance.

Exhibition poster