Jacqui Shelton
(b.1989, Moranbah, Barada Barna Land, Queensland. Lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne)

Jacqui Shelton is a visual artist and writer working with performance, filmmaking and online spaces. Using storytelling, documentation and vocal actions that are often ephemeral, Shelton engages with different histories and sites, examining the intimacies and conflicts that develop, and how these shape relations between people. Shelton is especially interested in how embodied experience, language and images can produce new meaning or undermine understanding.

In Paranoid Escapes, 2021, Shelton reconsiders common formats for moving-image works and how their spatiality changes the perception of time, such as the experience of scrolling and clicking through information and images on the internet. Described by the artist as a ‘doom scroll work’, in Paranoid Escapes images appear and disappear onscreen, moving between foreground and background to create an interchangeable and fluid space. This provokes an examination of the viewer’s memory and the associations between images, text and sound. Shelton uses vocal humming in the work to reference a bodily tremor – an embodied evidence of the human connection to Earth and a metaphor for the impacts of climate colonialism on Earth.

Shelton has produced exhibitions and performance works in association with Monash University Museum of Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Gertrude Contemporary, the Institute of Modern Art, West Space, Next Wave, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Tarrawarra Museum of Art, and with Channels Festival and Liquid Architecture. She regularly publishes her writing in print and online spaces and holds a PhD from Monash University.

Paranoid Escapes appeared in Community Hall on 12–18 Jun 2023

Film credits
Paranoid Escapes, 2021, 4K digital video, duration 12:10, copyright Jacqui Shelton, sound by Tim Royall