Seedling, Cornelius Johnson’s Olympic Oak, Koreatown, Los Angeles, United States of America. Growing in what was probably the back yard of the athlete’s mother. Difficult to find, this tree was mentioned in a Los Angeles Times article dated 2007. Cornelius Johnson received one of several Gold Medals won by African Americans at the games. He returned to the US where racial segregation was practised until 1964. Johnson died in 1946

Shelton’s massing of large scale diptych photographs of oak trees comprising in a forest forms a charged reminder of past atrocities and histories. The trees are individually survivors from the 1936 Berlin Olympics, given as seedlings to the 130 Gold Medallist athletes by Hitler or Olympic Committee members and subsequently planted around their home towns. Shelton tracked down many of the living trees around the world, initiated by the presence of the oak given to Jack Lovelock for his 1500m win and now growing in Shelton’s hometown of Timaru. in a forest is a psychical reminder of National Socialist Germany and a past that the world swore never to forget or repeat, and conveys the long history of nature symbolism in Europe as well as modes of disbursal of ideological power.

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