The Art of Community

Join us for an inspiring panel discussion celebrating the ways artists use their creative voices to share personal stories of childlessness, challenge societal norms, and build community through art. You’ll get an insight into their artistic process and personal journey.

This event invites conversation and shared experiences, focusing not on artistic skill but on the power of connection and the role of art in activism and expanding the public dialogue around living childfree or childless lives.

The panel will include:

Melanie Stidolph
Melanie Stidolph is a Cornwall-based artist working with still & moving images, trained in British Columbia and in Leeds and has exhibited throughout the UK, New York and Canada. Her work gained recognition for its understated subjects; poised between staged and documentary photographic traditions. Practice has since developed from an expression of grief and longing and through inviting others to make work with her. ‘Still, Held’ (2024) Hospital Rooms commission made with patients and staff. ‘The next dawn, the next spring’ (2023) made with women who are childless and struggling to conceive; forming a choir to sing a lament to the sea.

Kristina Borg
Kristina Borg is a freelance artist, researcher, facilitator and practitioner of the unknown. She explores ideas through visual thinking, using participatory and co-creative processes where art is a tool and a reality. Her work specialises between and outside established disciplines. Kristina invests time in walking, observing, listening, conversing, thinking, making and exploring with specific intersectional, multispecies communities – human and more-than-human – as a practice of inhabiting and sharing moments of togetherness, co-creating artistic experiences that reimagine diverse and ethical ways of living and surviving well together.

Victoria Robinson
Victoria is an artist, dancer, masseuse and a multidisciplinary artist based in Yorkshire, England. With a deep background in therapeutic touch and conscious movement dance her work is about how something feels. Using the landscapes of touch, movement, sound and smell as well as physical materials such as paint, paper, thread and fabrics, Victoria expresses embodied personal narratives in the mediums of installation and spoken word.
Her work invites meditative movement to unfurl in the observer allowing participants the chance to feel what they feel and notice what they notice.

The final panel line up may change as we are working to seek a wide range of voices for every event at the festival.

This event is for people who are Childless and Childfree and their supporters.

This event may feature strong language, mention of abortion, trauma, pregnancy, miscarriage, and suicidal ideation. Please look out for yourself and others and please remember you can come and go from any event.

If you have any access needs for example noise sensitivity, mobility or if there is any other support you need, please add yourself to the access register here. We will get in touch with you before the event to chat about we can support you to have the best experience of the discussions group events