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 phenomenona 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. 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).

Contact: shelley@shelleykirkwood.com

UK: CICEKgallery.com

Instagram: @shelleykirkwoodstudio