May 2015, Solent Showcase, Southampton UK

Curated by Kate Maple

Artists: Mandy Lee Jandrell and Melanie Stidolph

Eventually Everything Connects was a two‑person installation by artists Melanie Stidolph and Mandy Lee Jandrell, presented at Southampton Solent University’s city‑centre gallery from 18 May to 20 June 2015. The exhibition brought together previously unseen moving‑image works by Stidolph and a series of collage‑based installations by Jandrell, forming a closely connected and deeply dialogic body of work.

Throughout their careers, both artists have used photography as a means of exploring aesthetics and the cultural production of meaning. In this exhibition, they questioned their relationship to the camera and the printed image through multiple experimental approaches. Eventually Everything Connects emerged from conversations between the artists spanning eight years; during this time, both practitioners shifted from working closely with singular photographic images to embracing fragmented scenes, overlapping forms and visual interruptions. Their shared aim was to unsettle their existing ways of working and disrupt the coherence of the image, using fragmentation as both method and metaphor.

For this exhibition, Jandrell produced three installation works that expanded her ongoing investigation into perception, materiality and the unstable boundaries between photographic and spatial experience.

The first installation, Spooky Action, took its title from the quantum physics phrase “spooky action at a distance”—a reference to the unseen, the interconnected and the unfathomable. This large‑scale, highly saturated collage was constructed from images shot in flowerbeds in Victoria Park, Hackney. Through fragmentation and exaggerated scale, the work invited viewers to imagine non‑human perception, suggesting the viewpoint of a bee navigating an immense floral landscape.

The second installation, Vibration, consisted of small circular mirrors mounted on photographic lighting stands, onto which abstract colour was projected using a 35mm slide projector. The shifting reflections, cast in an entirely analogue register, played with phenomenology and the mechanics of seeing—light, colour, surface and movement.

The third installation, Let All the Children Boogie (a reference to David Bowie), took the form of a transparent vinyl collage applied directly to the gallery’s window. Visible from both inside and outside, the work generated layered and contrasting perceptions depending on the viewer’s position, emphasising simultaneity, transparency and the mutability of image‑space.

Together, these works formed an expanded dialogue on interruption, perception and photographic instability. Eventually Everything Connects stands as a key moment in Jandrell’s practice, marking a deep collaboration and a shared exploration of how images think, shift and connect across time, space and viewpoint.

http://official.blog.solent.ac.uk/press-releases/eventually-everything-connects/