Peter Cochrane | Where the Image Hesitates and the Self Disappears

“You have to be delusional to be an artist.”

That’s how Peter Cochrane closes our conversation. We’re sitting across from each other in a quiet Richmond studio, the air thick with pollen and thought. The line lands not as a punchline but as a thesis offered without irony. What does it mean to believe in a practice that resists productivity metrics, that trades stability for questions, that takes itself seriously enough to build whole worlds and dismantle them again?

Cochrane is a conceptual artist in the most precise sense of the term. For him, the idea always precedes the making. “Conceptual” isn’t just an aesthetic or an intellectual posture; it’s a method of listening to materials, histories, environments, and limitations, then choosing the one that best carries the question forward. Born and raised in San Diego, Cochrane came of age in the lingering influence of the Light and Space movement, where medium and message collapsed into one experience. But where Light and Space sought transcendence, Cochrane reaches sideways: into decay, into translation, into fiction.

Photography is one of his common tools, but he refuses to be boxed in by its expectations. He’s critical of how photography, especially so-called “documentary photography,” masquerades as truth. “I don’t believe in documentary photography,” he tells me. “The camera is always translating. There’s no such thing as an unbiased image.” This skepticism isn’t about rejecting the image; it’s about acknowledging its limitations, especially when it comes to representation. Cochrane is wary of how photography has been used to cement identities, to reify the self into a legible, consumable unit. Against this, he quotes actor Joanna Lumley: “There’s no point in looking inside, there’s nothing there.” For Cochrane, “the self is a well that runs dry very quickly.”

Instead, he insists on being an observer first. Observation, for him, is not passive; it’s how he makes sense of the world’s contradictions. And beauty, he tells me, is a strategy: “Beauty is a lure.” It’s the hook that pulls you close, the mechanism that gets you to look—and then look again. His work might first seduce with color, composition, or scale, but the seduction quickly gives way to complexity: pierced petals suspended by gold thread, a body missing its head, still lives with a pulse of unease. “I want the viewer to enter the work through beauty,” he says, “and then stay for the questions.”

There is, however, one body of work that reverses this usual trajectory—beginning not with the concept, but with experience. The Sensual World, a body of work born from walking Richmond’s park systems with a therapist and a camera during a multi-year recovery from debilitating panic attacks. It was the first time in years that Cochrane had taken his camera outside, returning to the landscape as a site of vulnerability, healing, and reconsideration.

This project is also a pivot point—one that brings us to Richmond, where Cochrane moved after living in San Francisco. The West Coast, once expansive and liberating, had become constricting to him. An internal sense of stasis pushed him to seek sustainability, both materially and emotionally. “Getting on the plane was the first time I’d left San Francisco in years,” he admits. “I needed a complete upset.”

Richmond offered something else—a change in rhythm. Unlike California’s temperate sameness, Richmond unfolds in bloom and decay, feast and frost. Spring here arrives as a shock of color. “You forget every year,” he laughs. “And then suddenly—it’s all here.” For an artist who resists stagnation, who sees boredom as a kind of death, this changeable landscape was a kind of relief.

It tracks, then, that one of his newest works is titled: The State Flower of Virginia is Actually a Tree—The Flowering Dogwood Acts as Harbinger of both Spring and Fall with its Early Blossoms and Changing Leaves. Cochrane doesn’t just title his works, he lets the title become the work. It invites, instructs, lingers. Pull out your phone and look it up. Never stop seeking information.

If change is the only constant, Cochrane is its apprentice. He tells me that art should push thinking. “We should always be learning,” he says, “learning and teaching.” The idea that someone is born to be an artist doesn’t resonate with him. “I wasn’t drawing as a kid. I decided to become an artist at 20 because I wanted something that would keep me thinking until I die.” For him, making art isn’t about essence but about commitment. It’s a practice built on instability, curiosity, and rigor.

This ethos of engagement extends far beyond his studio. Cochrane is the founder of Studio Threep, a fine art printing space that began as a way to fill a gap in Richmond’s creative infrastructure. “I started printing for other artists during grad school,” he says, “and it grew from there.”

Currently, he is stepping into a leadership role as President of the Board of Trustees at 1708 Gallery, an institution with nearly half a century of history in the city, founded by VCU alumni, of which Cochrane is one. He’s now helping steer the gallery into its next phase, expanding its programming.

Among recent additions is an Artist Residency that offers a monthly stipend and a spacious apartment upstairs, designed for both living and working, in the heart of the Arts District. “Space is so hard to hold onto in cities,” he explains. “The fact that 1708 owns its building means the mission will keep evolving without being uprooted.”

For Cochrane, evolution is the goal. “A contemporary space has to keep changing. That’s what keeps it alive.” He believes that vitality depends on connection, not just to place or history, but to one another. At 1708, it’s the interplay between the board’s artist-led vision and the staff’s diverse professional expertise that allows the institution to adapt and endure. It’s not one mind but many that keep the space breathing.

His belief in the speculative, the transformative, and the provisional brings us to science fiction—a genre he holds close. “Science fiction lets you imagine better futures,” he says. “Or worse ones. But the point is: it lets you imagine.” Listening to him, I thought of Darko Suvin’s 1979 essay “Estrangement and Cognition,” in which Suvin argues that the best science fiction causes “cognitive estrangement”: it takes what we know, distorts it just enough to defamiliarize it, and in doing so, makes it visible again. This is what Cochrane’s work does too. It asks: What if the body wasn’t carbon-based? What if the flower was a warning? What if beauty was a trap? What if the self isn’t the point?

Cochrane calls it delusional to be an artist, but it’s also a refusal. A refusal to settle for what is easily seen, easily named, easily known. His delusion is a wager: that art still matters, not because it asserts truth, but because it makes truth feel newly strange.

And maybe that’s the real lesson. To be an artist is to believe, against all odds, that the world can still be reimagined.

 1, Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 3–5.

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