‘I first saw a Melanie Stidolph work at a group show at Keith Talent in 2006.  I loved it immediately.  It was a photo of some clouds.  But as well as loving it I also thought, eh, what’s going on here?  I mean, this was a show with works by Gordon Dalton, Clunie Reid, and Shaun Doyle and Mally Mallinson and then there was this – this, yes, let’s say it: beautiful image of some clouds. 

So, I go home and I check out the internet and here’s a website with more of Melanie Stidolph’s work and these images are making me go a bit weird – sort of really bad, clichéd images and yet..yet.. not. She was doing something with clichés themselves. Trying to find out why a cliché was a cliché. How it became.

I rarely use the word ‘bold’ and certainly never ‘brave’ to describe an artist’s work but I had at least to look in my thesaurus to try and take me close to deciding what Melanie does. If you look too quickly you miss it. But if you give it time, what she is doing is amazing. Really out there and with subject matter that many artists just wouldn’t go near. Brilliant.’

Russell Herron, Journals, published as catalogue text for ‘The Russell Herron Collection’, Sartorial Contemporary Art, 2009