Heaped, hanging, climbing and draping, FEELS is an installation by artist Josephine Cachemaille. Working with a range of precious, crafted and familiar objects, FEELS composes hybrid sculpture/paintings into a lively, suggestive and humorous assemblage.
Here, Cachemaille’s aluminium structures take on anthropomorphic forms which, dressed in materials and appendages, proposes them as ‘bodies’ with needs, desires and the capacity to act. Describing her installations as ‘collaborations,’ she charges them with active, human functions, asking us what these objects might say, think or feel?
By manoeuvring her objects into new and purposeful relationships, Cachemaille intends to disperse our focus of the visual towards an awareness of the body, the senses and the surrounding environment. In this way, she explores the potential of art-making as a kind of relational ontology, prioritising the relationships between things, and challenging dominant ways of knowing objects in their passive physical sense.
Josephine Cachemaille is an award-winning installation artist based in Nelson. She has had multiple solo and group exhibitions both internationally and throughout Aotearoa New Zealand. Her work explores art-making as a place to engage with materials as having an agency of their own. Cachemaille holds a degree in Psychology from the University of Otago, Dunedin, and a post-graduate diploma in Fine Arts from AUT University, Auckland. Josephine Cachemaille is represented by Sanderson Contemporary, Auckland.
Image: Josephine Cachemaille: The Travellers 2018 (detail)