Ann Shelton

Ann Shelton's large‑scale, hyper-real images mix conceptual and documentary modes of photography, investigating the social, political and historical contexts that inform readings of nature and landscape. 

In Shelton’s work, what is visually absent is as important as what is present. Her work is haunted by what is not seen. Shelton’s practice, built on foundations of deep research, challenges the traditional convention of photography that what you see is the subject. While the subjectivity, the questionable truth, of documentary photography has long been understood her work operates in what is called an expanded field where the image itself is the apex of a myriad complex of underlying ideas.

Mirroring, inverting, doubling, pairing, along with clear titles, are strategies Shelton employs to encourage the viewer to question the image, to suggest that all is not as it seems and to invite us into a deeper, broader experience of the work.

A major review of the photographer's 20 years of practice - Ann Shelton: Dark Matter showed at Auckland Art Gallery and Christchurch Art Gallery from later 2016 – 2018. Promoted as offering a fresh insight into the artist's deeply researched and explorative imagery, the exhibition uncovers the dark matter or unknown substance in her art in which time, place, narrative, trauma and female authorship unfold in shifting and destabilising ways. 

In the 300 page book Dark Matter, produced to accompany the exhibition, Ann's aesthetic is described by Dr Cassandra Barnett as including "doublings and multiples, decenterings, exclusions and displacements; stories buried or undone; surface visuality and dark depths; control and the uncontrollable." 

Shelton’s recent series - jane says and the missionaries – also allude to concealed stories. Dramatic, large-scale, richly coloured photographic works, they draw from Ikebana and western floral traditions to reference little known histories of plant use in fertility control and colonisation.

Ann Shelton is recognised as one of New Zealand's leading photographic artists and is the paramount winner of two New Zealand contemporary art awards (the 2010 COCA Anthony Harper Contemporary Art Award and the 2006 Trust Waikato Contemporary Art Award). Her work has been widely exhibited and features in numerous public and private collections in New Zealand and overseas. Ann lives in Wellington.