Ann Shelton

Ann Shelton

Ann Shelton identifies as queer. Her work engages questions around the disciplined body and how that discipline plays out through gender, sexuality, reproduction, misogyny, medicine, food, and crime, most recently in relation to plants and their impacts on the body.

Shelton’s work with plant materials is reviewed in Artforum, Hyperallergic, artnet news, and Evergreen Review. She is represented in collections throughout Aotearoa, Australia, and North America. Shelton’s first institutional solo exhibition in the United States, i am an old phenomenon, was presented at Alice Austen House, New York in 2024. Alice Austen House Press also simultaneously published Shelton’s award-winning book worm, root, wort…& bane.

For more than a decade, Ann Shelton has explored the micro, marginal, bleak and traumatic counterhistories of plants through her photographic and performance-based artwork. Linking gender politics and the climate crisis in a critical moment, ‘i am an old phenomenon’ bears even greater significance as she reinvestigates lost knowledge pertaining to plants and their relationship to female ontology through the figure of the witch.