about me
Selin Sel (b. 2002) is a Brooklyn-based artist from Istanbul, Turkey.
Working primarily with acrylic and industrial plastics, she produces layered, stratified forms through a self-developed technical fabrication process, resulting in structures that appear engineered and self-forming. This method reflects an ongoing pursuit of resolution. The work is not only about control, but is built through it.
In earlier works such as Ear and Lemon, the body is not depicted directly but displaced. Marked by shame and guilt around sexuality, these works encode desire through indirection. Cavities, openings, and interior spaces are rendered through objects that remain outwardly neutral, allowing the work to signal the body without fully exposing it. Rather than presenting sexuality, she embeds it within form under conditions of constraint.
This logic extends into a broader engagement with womanhood and motherhood. Selin Sel’s work does not reject these inherited structures, but remains implicated within them. Identification and repression coexist: the body is both a site of attachment and a site of limitation. Works such as Womb/Tomb stage this tension directly, positioning the womb as both origin and boundary, a space that protects, but cannot be inhabited indefinitely. Growth, in this context, is conditional. What sustains can also suffocate.
Material plays a central role in articulating these dynamics. Plastic, glossy, seductive, and culturally aligned with ideals of use and appearance, functions as both surface and concept. Its transparency forces the image to be in flux. As the viewer moves, layers shift, colors fluctuate, and forms become alternately exposed and obscured. Visibility becomes an active force, placing the object in a vulnerable state of continuous exposure.
Selin Sel’s approach to making reflects this same structure. Rather than beginning from a fixed conceptual position, her work emerges through process. Meaning is not imposed in advance but uncovered over time, as connections between forms become legible after they are made. In this sense, the work functions as a method of access, a way of entering and navigating internal structures that resist direct articulation.
