VCP’s PRINT GALLERY

October 2026 Featured Work:

TRANSMUTATIONS
Photographs by Shelley Kirkwood

Exhibition Dates: October 2nd – November 1st, 2026 
Opening Reception: October 2nd, 5:00 – 8:00pm

Artist Statement: 

Anthotype is an image-making technique that traces back to the origins of photography in the 19th century. This process utilizes natural pigments extracted from flowers to create a light-sensitive emulsion. Once coated onto paper, the emulsion is exposed to sunlight over the course of several days or even weeks. The resulting images are ephemeral, delicate, and deeply tied to the passage of time. The images become lyrical distillations of the more-than-human world.

After exposure, I scan these prints and digitally alter them. With these tools, I can paint detail, alter colors and make enhancements that both honor and preserve the original process, while also allowing for alterations that echo the character of the flowers and the places they come from. The final giclée prints preserve both the fragility, mystery, and  essence of the original works, while offering compelling dimensions of color, scale, and texture.

There is an intentional reciprocity in the process. An image of a plant made with the plant quite organically evokes ideas of mutual witnessing and shared presence. Plants, like humans, carry memory, respond to stimuli, and, as some research suggests, may even possess a form of consciousness. I think of them as portraits. The soft, fading, and often grainy or blurred quality of the images gestures toward impermanence,an expression of the transient and ever-changing qualities of nature. In this way, the work serves as both meditation and memento, a means of expressing my sense of the passing of time as we experience it through the natural world.

Artist Bio: 

Shelley Kirkwood is an American photographer and writer whose work engages the natural world as a site of observation, transformation, and temporal experience. Her practice spans nineteenth- through twenty-first-century photographic traditions, moving fluidly between cameraless and lens-based processes. Grounded in an ongoing inquiry into time understood both as a physical dimension of change and as a subjective, perceptual condition shaped by memory, attention, and emotion, Kirkwood’s recent work expresses time and memory as layered phenomena articulated through light, movement, and material.

Working with processes such as anthotype, Kirkwood employs the substances of the landscape itself to register fleeting moments, allowing image and matter to collapse into a single form. Across her projects, acts of distillation and transformation are central, guided by sustained looking and a rigorous commitment to formal clarity.

Kirkwood received a BA in Photography from Hampshire College and an MFA from the University of Arizona. Her early years in New England, along with professional experience in the curatorial departments of the Center for Creative Photography and the High Museum of Art, have shaped her interdisciplinary perspective and engagement with visual culture. Kirkwood currently teaches for institutions that include the Berkshire Botanical Gardens, the New England Botanical Gardens, and Orion Environmental Magazine. Since her first exhibition at the Midtown Y Gallery in New York in 1994, her work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally.

She lives and works in a restored nineteenth-century church in western Massachusetts, where seasonal shifts and the surrounding rural landscape continue to inform her practice.

Upcoming solo exhibitions include the Vermont Center for Photography (2026), the Springfield Museum of Art, Massachusetts (2027), and the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum (2028).

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