Ann Shelton

Shelton hints at the difference between her images and the ‘real thing’, through her use of colour. While documentary photographs of modernist design are usually black and white, Shelton’s works are full, vibrant colour. Through reconstructing modernism, Shelton also has the opportunity to rewrite its history, and she does so with a feminist twist. Her use of luscious, juicy colours, tactile fabric, domestic settings, and titles such as Calendar Girl, Golden Girl or Show Girl, feminise and sexualise these modernist spaces.

A recent series, jane says, created for her 2016 exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery Dark Matter, features plants traditionally associated with treatments for women's fertility placed in ikebana-like arrangements against vibrant coloured backgrounds. The artist spent a year researching, collecting, arranging and photographing the plants, which include thistle, fennel, rhododendron and yarrow. She says:

Between 2008 and 2018 Shelton served as a trustee of Enjoy Public Art Gallery, Wellington's longest running artist-run space. She co-chaired Enjoy's board from 2010-2012 and was its Chair from 2012–2018.

Shelton has frequently employed techniques of doubling, reversing and inverting photographs. She refers to this approach as 'visual stammering', and uses it to draw attention to the subjectivity of photography. Doublet (after Heavenly Creatures), Parker/Hulme crime scene, Port Hills, Christchurch, New Zealand (from 2001) from her Public Spaces series (2001–2003) for example is a diptych made up of a single image of a curve of a forest path, one moving to the left and one to the right. The seemingly banal image draws its power from the site it documents, the location of the murder of Honorah Parker, later dramatised in Peter Jackson's film Heavenly Creatures. In another work, Wintering, after a Van der Velden study, Otira Gorge from 2008, Shelton works from a preparatory sketch by Dutch-born artist Petrus van der Velden held in the collection of the Hocken Library at the University of Otago, choosing the rough drawing over the artist's dramatic oil paintings of the same topic.

Her 2000 series Abigail's Party consists of seven photographs which initially look like documentary shots of modernist homes' living rooms. However each image was staged in Shelton's own home. Discussing the works, Ingrid Neilson wrote:

Shelton was born in Timaru. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland in 1995 and a Master of Fine Arts at the University of British Columbia in 2002.

Ann Shelton (born 1967) is a New Zealand photographer and academic.