Josephine Cachemaille

I am an installation artist who makes objects and assemblages. I have a deeply anthropomorphic methodology, approaching materials as sensuous bodies with agency, often thinking of them as alive, as “collaborators”, as a family. In this sense, I am exploring the potential of art-making as magical, as a kind of relational ontology, where dominant ways of “knowing” the world are challenged.

My works are both figurative and abstract and explore narratives that are autobiographical, mythological and universal. My making techniques include painting, dying, sewing, carving, casting, and sculpting with clay and wood; and I work with many materials, particularly cloth, clay, plants and found objects. I am more interested in the emotional and sensory properties of materials than their formal ones.

My hands-on, intersubjective making processes kindle attachments and enduring affectionate relationships between myself and the final works, which often evoke bodies or entities. These pieces then populate installations which operate as psychological landscapes rich in symbolic visual language, that I can examine, order, and arrange as I think through tender things. 

My work is concerned with nurture, care and healing and my early training in psychology is embedded in my approach (most recently in my current solo exhibition New Psychic Life exploring the symbols, images and emotional psychic material gleaned during my experiments with a Jungian meditation technique, Active Imagination ). However, the tone is often funny and wry, critically examining the problematic nature of the wellness economy, and the rise of the quasi-spiritual industry.