Maya Selway
Jewellery Designer
Raised in London within a creative, communal environment, Selway’s early years were anything but conventional. The daughter of a painter and a poet, she grew up surrounded by making, thinking, and sharing — her childhood filled with days spent in artist studios and workshops. This early immersion in creativity, coupled with an upbringing that blurred traditional structures, fostered an intuitive understanding of objects as vessels of meaning. It is perhaps here that her enduring fascination with the emotional life of objects first began to take shape.
Her training at Camberwell College of Arts provided a conceptual foundation at a time when British art was still shaped by the legacy of the Young British Artists. While much of this was bold and confrontational, Selway found herself drawn to a quieter, more introspective language. The work of Rachel Whiteread, Cornelia Parker and Mona Hatoum proved particularly influential—artists whose practices explored domestic space, absence, and the emotional traces left within everyday environments. Their work helped shape Selway’s early interest in objects as poetic and psychological forms, rather than purely functional ones.
At the core of Selway’s practice is a meticulous and highly specialised approach to gold. Drawn to its unique properties—its malleability, permanence, and almost paradoxical strength—she works with the material in a way that emphasises understanding over control.
"Gold is extraordinary — it can be pushed to extremes, yet it never loses itself.”Maya Selway
