Chelsea Selvan (b.1997, Johannesburg South Africa) holds a BA Fine Arts, with distinction, from the University of the Witwatersrand. She currently heads up the Editorial, Marketing and Social Media department for Latitudes Online and the RMB Latitudes Art Fair.
Her previous work experience at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, William Kentridge’s the Centre for the Less Good Idea, and the Wits Art Museum inculcated a keen interest in the way various genres and mediums of art and performance can intersect in gallery and museum spaces.
Selvan is driven by art and its ability to evoke emotion, challenge perspectives and spark dialogue.
Inspired by intangible feelings and tangible objects Chelsea Selvan’s work explores the fugitive nature of memory, through seemingly abstract means. Her printmaking engages fluid colour fields, some carefully graded others painterly in their rendering. These are used as a backdrop to her dynamic compositions of calligraphic mark making and floating geometric forms.
These configurations are a tentative notation of her fleeting thoughts and an echo of architectural spaces that have imprinted themselves in her mental and emotional fabric.
Selvan was the 2022 recipient of the prestigious ABSA L’Atelier award.
Blue Opalescence IIBlue Opalescence IOf being Heard and of being SeenA Seeming StillnessAlways SearchingUntoldHomeThe Internal Workings of My MindUn Echo du PasséA Whisper of the Past ‘We are all a sun-lit moment come from a long darkness’Invisible ThreadBalancing ActEngraved IIIEngraved IIEngraved I An Echo of Light IIAn Echo of Light ICurrents of air II – SOLDCurrents of air I – SOLDThe Forest Swayed – SOLDBefore the WindStructureWhirlwind – SOLDScatterThis is how you wereInto Time – SOLDRain in a foreign city is different from rain in a place you know – SOLDLimbic Resonance Thumbprint of a Night Sky I, II, III – SOLD‘Like a flute heard distantly down a hillside of olives, or a voice calling to a boat from a shore’ II‘Like a flute heard distantly down a hillside of olives, or a voice calling to a boat from a shore’ I – SOLDShadows of Early LightEntanglementsRemebering – SOLDInto the Deep
