Sheldrick

During the COVID-19 period, Sheldrick expanded into AI image generation, treating it as a continuation of photographic construction by other means. The work that followed can be described as image assembly: building scenes from landscapes, fragments, references, and datasets, and then editing them into compositions that retain the sheen of photography while quietly disclosing their artifice. The stated coordinates of his AI practice are beauty, nature, and technology, with nature appearing not as a stable category but as an image problem; something continually stylized, edited, restored, and re-authored.

A key strand of Sheldrick’s work is archival and vernacular photography. For the project Empire, for example, he has described building an archive of more than 35,000 color slides sourced from secondhand markets and estate sales, spanning mid-century through the late twentieth century, and using restoration and AI processes to transform these images into layered compositions that test how photography preserves – and distorts – historical memory.

Alongside his fine-art projects, Sheldrick has an active client practice producing AI-driven visuals for cultural and corporate commissions – work for organizations such as Manchester City FC, Coke Studios, Standard Chartered, Mercedes-Benz, and London music venues and DJs.

Overall, Sheldrick’s practice can be read as one big study in how images are made persuasive: how photographic realism can be simulated, how the concept of ‘nature’ is presented to us (spoiler: as a designed product), how archives can be aestheticized, where and why things should be polished or given more ‘scruff’, and how cultural narratives can be re-written.