Vita Cochran is an Aotearoa-born, Sydney-based artist working in textiles. She is known for her complex hand embroidery, large-scale abstract works, and wearable and functional objects. Her work has been exhibited widely in Australia and New Zealand and collected by the Auckland Museum, Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand, Tūhura Otago Museum, and the Dowse Art Museum. She holds an MA in Art History from the University of Auckland (1998).
Recent work has included a series of Rorschach-like textile banners, called ‘Exploded Coats’, which revealed the delirious array of shapes and colours contained within fastidiously unpicked second-hand garments, and a series of hand-hooked rag rugs, called ‘After Paintings’, which brought to life rugs seen in paintings of interiors by, for example, Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse, drawing attention to the under-acknowledged influence of textiles on modernist painting.
In 2024 Vita was Artist in Residence at the UTS Library, where, working in situ among students, she embroidered life-like moths to the library’s upholstered furniture. Titled an eclipse of moths, this anti-monumental public art project intrigued many with its trompe l’oeil effects and invitation to reflect on the intricacy, vulnerability and prodigious beauty of the natural world.
Those qualities are central in Vita’s recent exhibition for day01. gallery, which imagines ‘one night’ in which moths from many times and places are attracted to a single wall of the gallery. This assembly celebrates the fragile beauty of these creatures while inviting us to imagine what future nights might look like for these harbingers of environmental change.
Although they portray moths, these sculptures, Vita states, are ultimately about human perception and attention: the challenge of truly seeing these exquisite creatures and finding a form for their intricacy.
b. 1975 Aotearoa New Zealand; Lives and works in Sydney.
Vita Cochran
Granny’s Cloak Moth (Speiredonia spectans), 2025
hand-embroidered cotton thread, felt, fabric, wire
50 x 115 mm
Vita Cochran
Emperor Gum Moth (Opodiphthera eucalypti), 2025
hand-embroidered cotton thread, felt, fabric, wire
50 x 115 mm