Melanie Stidolph

1. Please tell us a bit about yourself and your work.
I’m an artist. I live in Cornwall in the UK; I’m fortunate to have the close presence of the sea. My studio is in St Ives, famous for artists and the light. I work there and in the landscape, sometimes on my own, sometimes with others. Over the last few years I’ve drawn very specifically on my experience around trying to and not having children, through the book Endless Reproduction, the ongoing photo series Last Summer, and The next dawn, the next spring, a project made in 2023 with women who identified as struggling to conceive and childless not by choice.

2. Has writing always been a focus for you or was it a Plan B?
Art has always been part of my life, not a Plan B - maybe my whippet, Lincoln, is that, and also running from London to the sea in 2015 and meeting my husband here (a surprise Plan B). I studied art at the University of Leeds and the University of British Columbia in Canada. It took a really long time to know I wouldn’t be a parent and it’s proving a long time still to come to terms with it - I’m not sure I will ever be able to say I accept it. I’ve always made art, alongside other roles, like my current one as Curator, Public Programme at Tate St Ives. I look at my art practice as a way to understand how I view the world and to connect with others, and lately, advocating for a deeper knowledge of how this experience of not having children can colour your world.

3. How do you explore ideas or find inspiration for your work?
My photographic practice was developed through taking my self away from the city where I lived, out to the countryside, and just walking, looking for things that connected with my own interior world. Often the desire to take a photograph would be related to a shift in the light or seeing something a little out of the ordinary. It was a slow, meditative way of working. I put this way of working to one side during the intensity of trying to conceive and worked with digital, rather than film, and used triggers to fire the shutter, which reacted to changes in light, sound or movement. I took hundreds of photographs in the studio and in the home, out of frustration, and a need to try and express something of the painful experience I was caught up in. These photographs later became the book Endless Reproduction, which was featured in The Guardian. Each chapter is accompanied by a text that narrates scenes from my life and art making; the both intertwined.

I picked up a film camera again in 2017 when I was travelling in New Zealand and began the ongoing series Last Summer. There was a beautiful scene of an extended family, arranged around the edge of a natural rock pool. I wanted to be connected to it, to capture it, to try and show something of its beauty, and my own pain in viewing it. I found something positive in being able to look long enough to frame a photograph, rather than turn away from this scene I couldn’t recreate in my own life. The most recent photographs in this series capture a family on a rock in Trevone, Cornwall - they are jumping in, running across the rocks and, in the series of images, I capture a little girl’s first jump into the pool (so the mum told me in our email exchange after). All the photographs share an element of chance and luck and this, I realise, is an underpinning of the work - simply that chance and luck weren’t there for me when I was trying to get pregnant.

4. What does the process of writing involve for you?
It depends on the project. The above describes looking for, hunting for photographs, being alongside others and in places where scenes might appear. For the Endless Reproduction book, the photographs were the result of needing to make work, to photograph without being sure of a
particular outcome, needing to be occupied. For the recent project The next dawn, the next spring I worked with collaborators and participants to support a private performance of a group of women singing to the sea at dusk and dawn. The initial idea was to have our voices singing out a lament to the sea, for our voices to be the trigger for the lights that illuminate us on the rocks, the power of our voices making us visible. There are often simple connections or metaphors like this that spark a desire to develop a project. This one was really special, funded by Arts Council England and supported by Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange. It involved putting a call out for women who were struggling to conceive or who were childless not by choice. The whole project was so moving, felt important, and the resulting video shows something of that, but really, there is so much more about being there that the camera couldn’t share. It was a hugely significant piece for me and participants have called it "life-changing".

5. And what does writing then also give you in return?
At times making art gives me a platform to share issues and experiences that don’t get enough exposure or empathy. It can be difficult to make work that is deeply personal and share it - I often look for a metaphor or something to illuminate why a thing is difficult. I really admire the work of others who stick with the difficult, who say: "It’s this, it feels like this, I hurt like this." It’s incredibly validating for others. Making art gives me a chance to connect with others over a personal pain and to make what, I hope, are beautiful images that evoke layered emotional landscapes. It can be hard to make work around this topic, but for now, it’s where I need to be.

6. Has seeing your work in print changed how you view yourself, and also how you view your NoMo status?
I crowdfunded to support the production and print of Endless Reproduction, and was so uplifted by the support of others to make the book happen. At the in-conversation event with Dr Olga Smith, art historian, at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, when the book was launched it was wonderful - seeing friends across different times and areas of my life in the audience, sharing the work and my personal experience. It felt very solid, a marker. The personal grief of not having children doesn’t go away, but I am hugely supported by responses to my work and the connections with others that have been made through making and sharing it. And that there is a group of women who have been part of a singular experience, who supported me - "We want to support your vision, Mel" - to make something special together.

7. Tell us about the wider reception that you’ve had to sharing your story - has it changed how others have viewed you and your identity as a non-parent?
I don’t know if it’s changed how others view me, I guess I couldn’t say for sure, but it can be a worry that you are the ‘difficult’ one in the room, raising issues that are hard to hear. I think the internal pain can be more debilitating than the external perception, but they are wrapped up together - how your experience at times isn’t validated or understood. It can be painful how casual and thoughtless people are with their comments and attitudes. But there are so many others who aren’t, who understand, that you can be comfortable with, and share their pain and joy alongside your own.

8. How do you feel about the current representation of childless and/or childfree people in literature?
I think it has been a trope that if there is a childless woman or couple that it is key to a plot line that draws only on their grief and desperation. When it's not like that, and it's just a part of a character, it’s a relief - it draws on and reflects normal life, and that’s all you want, something balanced.

9. What would you like the publishing world to know about non-parents, both as writers and readers, and our stories?
That it's not our job to educate. It’s their job to look at what experience they are representing. My world is the art world and lately there have been strides to include, in experiences of grief and loss, a fuller discussion and representation of motherhood. In my role at Tate St Ives I co-programmed with curator Katy Norris and Sria Chatterjee and Sarah Victoria Turner from The Paul Mellon Centre (who funded the event) - ‘(M)otherhood: Art & Life’ alongside the recent Barbara Hepworth exhibition. The event sought to explore a reading of Hepworth’s work that might come from one of grief, loss or absence around motherhood. I was so moved by the contributions that eloquently explored alternative readings of the work. This year, partly inspired by that event, our keynote speaker, the curator and writer Hettie Judah, invited myself and artist Sally Butcher to co-programme an event with her at MAC, Birmingham as part of her touring exhibition ‘Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood’. The resulting event, ‘Picturing the Unseen: Grief and Labour In and Out of Motherhood’, was so powerful. It feels significant that this experience is out in the open more and can begin to inform how we might interpret art works, to broaden an assumption of the spectrum of motherhood and parenting. We are part of the percentage that makes the whole - we aren’t other, on the other side, not out, but in, and it's that I’d love to see embraced. We are part of the story, not a niche, not a side issue, but 20% of the population - if you haven’t described this experience, you haven’t described life.

10. What future plans do you have, especially for your writing?
To give myself the gift of time! To have a languid approach to my next project, to slow down, to take time, to find out how I need to make work. One thing that strikes me about making work around this topic is how I need to pay attention to everything around it. It’s not only about the end
result that others see, but the way you approach making it; a conversation held on the way to making something can be the most important thing about it.