Artist Database

Chelsea Selvan (b. 1997) holds a BA Fine Arts, with distinction, from the University of the Witwatersrand, and lives and works in Johannesburg. She currently heads the Content Department for Latitudes Online and the RMB Latitudes Art Fair.

Selvan has long held two parallel commitments - her professional life and her artistic practice - and has shaped a career that moves fluidly between both. Earlier roles 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 across gallery, museum and online spaces, which continues to inform how she thinks about making and showing work.

She was the 2022 recipient of the Absa L’Atelier Award - an opportunity that has continued to open doors and expand access within the broader arts ecosystem. In August 2024, she presented her first solo exhibition with Gallery 2, and between March and April 2026, Selvan was selected for an international residency at the prestigious Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris - marking a defining milestone in her artistic practice.

Selvan is driven by art and its ability to evoke emotion, challenge perspectives and spark dialogue - and remains deeply committed to both the making of work and the broader ecosystem that sustains it.

Chelsea Selvan’s practice explores the ways in which place, memory and feeling find form through colour, mark and abstraction. Working across painting, printmaking, drawing and collage, she creates compositions that function as a form of personal notation - holding onto fleeting impressions, fragments of architecture and the subtle details that shape her experience of the world.

She is drawn to marks weathered by the elements of time: worn walls, grooves on pavements, rusted surfaces, shafts of late afternoon light and the traces of human presence. These encounters become catalysts for abstract works that translate external experiences into internal reflections. Fluid colour fields, sometimes carefully graded, otherwise painterly in their rendering, provide a foundation for gestural calligraphic marks and floating geometric forms that oscillate between structure and spontaneity.

Her work subtly hints at the feeling of having been moved by place, and seeks to hold onto what is fleeting: the passing impression, an overlooked detail, the feeling of being moved by something encountered. Through abstraction, she creates a visual record of these experiences, offering a space where memory, feeling and lived experience coexist.