ABOUT SELENE
Selene Mauri Cochrane is a textile and mixed media artist living and working from her home-based studio in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Her practice is grounded in more than three decades of experience as a costume designer and maker, collaborating with Opera, Ballet, Performance Art, Circus, Contemporary and First Nations dance companies, among others. Now working full-time as an artist, she draws on her extensive skills in pattern making, dyeing, fabric manipulation, and embellishment, weaving these foundations seamlessly into her evolving passion for ceramics.
Her creative work is profoundly shaped by her personal experiences living with chronic pain caused by scoliosis and other health challenges. These ongoing realities fuel her drive to create pieces that rise above both emotional and physical suffering, transforming hardship into tactile, expressive forms. Through this process, Selene’s practice becomes not only an artistic pursuit but also a means of resilience, reflection, and healing.
Often dark and thought-provoking, Selene Mauri Cochrane’s work invites viewers to look inward and confront their own internal landscapes. Through recurring esoteric and existential themes—myth, fantasy, and a symbolic visual language—she brings forward truths that can be beautiful, uncomfortable, and often unspoken. Each piece is highly detailed and ornate, with every element meticulously crafted by hand, from ceramic pins and jewels to delicate hand-stitched lace and trims made on her antique Cornely machine. This commitment to fine craftsmanship echoes the layered, tangled nature of human experience.
Her art explores the creative and destructive forces that coexist within us, offering glimpses into parts of the self we don’t always acknowledge. Drawn to what is both strange and beautiful, she transforms thread and fabric into textures reminiscent of fur, feathers, flesh, and antlers, creating tactile surfaces that carry an air of mystery. These forms blur the boundaries between earthly and mystical realms, merging human and animal, dream and reality, innocence and darkness. In doing so, her work reflects the duality between the persona we show the world and the more complex truths beneath it—inviting viewers to consider where one ends and the other begins.