David Sheldrick is a British Korean artist based in London who uses artificial intelligence to reinterpret personal memory and archival photography. He trained as a fashion photographer before turning to AI art during the COVID-19 pandemic. His work ranges from AI-abstracted memories of his South Korean heritage to reimagined archival photographs that probe photography's historical ties to colonialism and British identity.
Sheldrick worked for nearly fourteen years as a fashion photographer and creative director, studying at the London College of Fashion and winning awards from organizations including Adobe and Broncolor. His AI art later drew commissions from major corporate and entertainment clients. He turned to AI art during the COVID-19 pandemic, quarantining in his late stepfather's apartment after his stepfather died of COVID-19. Following an eight-minute YouTube tutorial on the tool VQGAN, he spent the next two years working on his new practice for up to sixteen hours a day. His debut collection, Morning Calm, 2024, an edition of 100 works released on Fellowship, sold out quickly as part of a group show curated by Alejandro Cartagena. Weaving in Adam Curtis's concept of hypernormalization and the theories of Jean Baudrillard, the series channels his childhood memories of South Korea into AI-abstracted, K-pop-inflected landscapes dwelling on the tension between tradition and rapid modernization. A companion animation, Mongsangga, 2024 — Korean for someone who enjoys thinking about improbable things — carried these themes of Asian diaspora identity and fading memory into shifting dreamscapes that Alejandro Cartagena described as “a perfect representation of his Korean heritage”.
