Peter Shelton has been a working sculptor based in Los Angeles for over forty years. Originally from Ohio, Shelton grew up in Arizona. After graduating from Pomona College where he was initially a pre-med student, he followed with studies in anthropology, theater and fine art. He then attended the Hobart School of Welding Technology after which he worked as an industrial welder in Ohio and Michigan. Shelton received his MFA in sculpture at UCLA.
Shelton has been preoccupied with making a kind of sculpture that is physical and thoughtful at the same time. He induces a movement that attempts to bring our minds into the center of our bodies, to bring mass to the ineffable, or lightness to the deadly. He builds quasi-architectural environments where a viewer may literally enter and complete a sculpture bodily. Alternately, he makes discreet works that he calls "tight-fitting architecture," where entry, passage, and embodiment are virtual and projected through a sculptural skin via various holes, orifices and penetrations. He is engaged regularly and variously in such polarities as heavy and light, solid and hollow, inside and outside, object and field. His work can be very graphic and specific, or broad where detail is stripped away to reveal the simple bones of our existential condition.
Shelton has received four NEA grants, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, Flintridge Foundation Visual Artists Award, and the St. Gaudens Memorial Fellowship.
