For 25 years, Mela Cooke worked as a physiotherapist in The Gap, learning to read the human body through movement, balance, posture and injury. Today, those same instincts are at work in the bronze figures that have taken her from a Brisbane treatment room to galleries, exhibitions and collections around the world.
Cooke did not leave physiotherapy one day and become a sculptor the next. The two careers ran alongside each other for years.
While running her practice, she was studying sculpture, working in clay and marble and finding mentors who would help shape her technique. As her art career gathered momentum, the knowledge she had accumulated through physiotherapy came with her.
Today Cooke works from a studio in Indooroopilly, where the human figure remains at the centre of much of what she does.
Two Careers, Side by Side
Cooke began studying sculpture with Frank Lambert at the Brisbane Institute of Art in 1991. After three years there, she continued in Lambert’s private classes from 1993 until 2014 — more than two decades of mentorship that overlapped with much of her working life as a physiotherapist.
She also studied marble sculpture with Graham Radcliffe from 1998 to 2000 and with Italian sculptor Giovanni Balderi in 2000.
It was a long apprenticeship conducted around an established profession. Bronze casting was expensive, and physiotherapy remained Cooke’s livelihood while she developed her work and began finding an audience for it.
Gallery representation followed and her sculpture career continued to grow. Eventually, she reached the point where she could make the change she had been working towards. After 25 years in private practice, Cooke sold the business and became a full-time sculptor.
She left the treatment room, but not everything she had learned there.
Knowing When a Body Looks Right
After so many years working with patients, Cooke had developed an intimate understanding of how bodies behave.
There is anatomy, of course, but also balance, posture and the way weight moves through a figure. A shoulder changes when somebody relaxes. A seated body has to be supported somewhere. Even a person at rest carries the memory of movement.
Those details now turn up in bronze.
Photo Credit: Supplied
One example is High Tide, from Cooke’s swimmer series. The bronze depicts a swimmer sitting with her legs folded beneath her, goggles pushed onto her head and a pair of flippers resting alongside.
It is a quiet pose rather than an athletic one, but there is still a physicality to it. The swimmer looks as though she has stopped for a moment rather than been arranged for a portrait.
Cooke says her sculptures portray “the character and beauty of the people in my world”. Family and friends have frequently provided the starting point for her figurative work, with Cooke photographing models from different angles before beginning a figure in clay.
Her influences have come from well beyond physiotherapy. She names Constantin Brancusi and Henry Moore as two sculptors who particularly shaped her thinking, especially their use of strong lines and subtle gestures.
But years spent examining real bodies gave Cooke another foundation. When she sits down with clay, she already understands the mechanics beneath the pose.
Finding Her Medium
Cooke did not begin and end with bronze. Her training included marble and she has also worked with timber before arriving at the combination that now defines much of her practice: creating in clay and finishing in bronze.
“The process of working in clay is a sensual form of expression,” Cooke says.
It is the stage where a figure can still change beneath her hands. Surfaces can be worked, lines shifted and a pose adjusted before the sculpture begins its transformation into bronze.
Casting is another world entirely. The clay work is moulded, a wax version is produced and that eventually makes way for molten bronze. The cast pieces are joined and cleaned before the final surface and patina are applied.
What begins as something soft enough to reshape by hand ends as something intended to endure.
Cooke has spoken about the strength and beauty she finds in bronze, and its ability to retain tension and the suggestion of movement without losing subtle expression.
In High Tide, that is found not in a dive or swimming stroke, but in the pause afterwards.
From The Gap to a Wider Art World
Cooke’s decision to leave physiotherapy gave her the chance to make sculpture her working life, and the career that followed has travelled well beyond Brisbane.
Her bronzes are held in private collections in Australia as well as France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Hong Kong and Shanghai. Her public works include 24 sculptures in Maryborough and Dingo Family and Platypus at the Hervey Bay Cultural Centre.
Recognition has followed along the way. Cooke won the Family Choice Award at Victoria’s Montalto Sculpture Prize in 2018 and the 3D category of the Bundaberg Art Prize in 2021. She also served as president of Sculptors Queensland in 2015 and 2016, followed by four years as vice-president.
Her exhibition record now stretches back more than three decades, from early group shows in Brisbane to exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne, New Zealand and London. More recently, her work has appeared at Sculpture by the Sea at Bondi and sculpture walks in Sydney and Kiama.
It is a substantial second career, although calling it a second career does not quite tell the story.
Sculpture was already part of Cooke’s life while patients were still walking through the door of her practice in The Gap. There were years under Frank Lambert, later training with other sculptors and the gradual move towards bronze, all happening alongside physiotherapy.
Every day at work was giving her something else, too: years of observing the human body at close range.
Cooke now spends her working days with clay rather than patients. But when she adjusts the balance of a figure, settles its weight or tries to capture the suggestion of movement in a body at rest, part of her former profession is still there.
Mela Cooke left her physiotherapy practice in The Gap years ago. But every time she gives a bronze figure its balance, movement and life, those 25 years are still in her hands.
Published 8-September-2026