Shelley Horan’s otherworldly shots of everyday objects are a spectacle in styling

Shelley Horan’s ongoing body of still life work first took seed back in 2020 during lockdown. When we couldn’t be in close proximity to people (nor, therefore, capture them with cameras) the maker began to take a keen interest in the still-life genre of photography, turning to everyday objects as her creative fuel. “It’s been an itch I can’t seem to scratch ever since,” she says.

An avid thrifter, the creative often sources inspiration for her dynamic, saturated compositions in the cheap, accessible things that cross our paths day to day, or the dust-coated treasures you come across on junk shop shelves. In her portfolio of sleek, expertly styled images, photographing these common objects has become “an exercise in technique – to use arrangement and lighting to show familiar things in unfamiliar ways”, says Shelley.

The photographer has a particular knack for zooming in on a regular object and turning it into something that feels ethereal and unfamiliar, whether that’s taking an in-depth look at the colours of a pepper or a micro focus on the wick of a candle just before it blows out. From her commercial work to fine art photography, Shelley is always constructing these close-up landscapes of forms in her studio.

“The beauty and the curse of working indoors is that you’re always creating things from scratch”, the photographer says, “there’s very little intervention or input from the outside world.” Within these constraints, however, Shelley has found a place for daydreaming in amongst the blank spaces that feeds into the scenes she creates. “There’s always an urge to disrupt anything that becomes too precise”, she says, in order to “create friction in this controlled environment.” This childlike sense of exploration and play, inherent to her practice, is something that the photographer credits to her parents: “As a kid, they indulged all of my creative whims and this instilled a lot of courage. They’re also quite playful and silly themselves and so this idea of joy and play is at the heart of everything I do.”