Coinciding with her new publication Endless Reproduction, artist Melanie Stidolph is joined by art historian Dr Olga Smith to discuss the artist's experience of infertility and childlessness. The book metaphorically charts the journey of trying — from relying on nature, living by the calendar, assisted by drugs and interventions, and then increasingly random trying before eventually stopping. In Endless Reproduction birds document the human nest, apples photograph themselves falling up trees and balls hang in clusters in front of our vision while futile and wrong-headed experiments flash intermittently in the dark.
Biographies
Olga Smith is a historian of contemporary art, writer and curator, based at the University of Vienna. She writes about photography and new imaging technologies, interchanges between art and intellectual ideas, cultural memory, exhibitions, the Anthropocene and the questions of the environmental. She is the author of Contemporary Photography in France: Between Theory and Practice (Leuven University Press, 2022) and editor of Photography and Landscape (Photographies, 2019).
Melanie Stidolph's work is influenced by her experiences of infertility and childlessness and she is drawn to rock pools & mis-using photographic equipment. She studied at the University of Leeds and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Solo exhibitions include Campbell Works, London; Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art, Sunderland; and Kamloops Art Gallery, Canada. Group shows in London, Madrid, Vancouver and New York. Works from the book ‘Endless Reproduction’ are currently on display as part of Exeter Contemporary Open 2022. Her forthcoming solo show ‘As it is seen’ at Grays Wharf Gallery is funded by Arts Council England. She is Curator, Public Programme at Tate St Ives and lives in Cornwall.
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