Shelton began her career as a photojournalist working for daily newspapers, before deciding she wanted more control over her images and deciding to go to art school. As an artist, her work mixes conceptual and narrative traditions of photography. Shelton has acknowledged
Abigail Soloman-Godeau's essay 'Inside/Out' as an influence on the
Redeye works. Described by the artist as a 'social diary', the series was described by
Auckland Art Gallery photography curator
Ron Brownson as 'some of the most inventive and risk taking in recent art in New Zealand,'. 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 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. One of Shelton's best-known works is the multi-part
A library to scale. The artist took as her subject over 3,500 volumes of media clippings and handwritten transcriptions pasted into notebooks and hardback books by amateur historian Frederick B. Butler over a period of 60 years. She discovered the volumes at
Puke Ariki museum while undertaking a residency at the nearby
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. The works have been shown in solo presentations and also as part of group exhibitions examining the nature of the archives, such as
Collect/Project at the
Adam Art Gallery and
Unpacking my library at Te Tuhi. 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. 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. 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: Ikebana, as I understand it, is the concept that nature is perfect, but there is just a little bit too much of it. It needs distilling and minimising and controlling. I was thinking about what would be an appropriate way to photograph these plants, something that would convey the control they are capable of asserting. She co-chaired Enjoy's board from 2010 to 2012 and was its Chair from 2012 to 2018. ==Exhibitions==