Before I got into the storeroom I imagined that the paintings, sculptures and objects might be a family, rife with rifts, loyalties, feuds, loves, and tolerances, held hostage in a building. Fancifully, I thought that maybe I would be a kind of therapist helping them express their inner lives. I assumed they would feel trapped, desperate, disconnected, but mostly they felt quiet and ready. It was weirdly moving.

– Josephine Cachemaille, 2017

At the time of writing, Josephine Cachemaille was preparing for an exhibition at Suter Art Gallery, Us, Us, Us, that involved juxtaposing her own work with artifacts from the institution’s collection, and with its fixtures and fittings. Her aim was to emphasise the interconnectedness of the physical and the intellectual, a relationship still routinely presented as an opposition. In her catalogue essay the show’s curator Sarah McClintock notes that while Cachemaille’s work incorporates a range of mediums and methods it tends not to juxtapose but instead to combine them. “Rather than a presentation of discreet, conceptually singular artworks,” she writes, “Us, Us, Us is instead a body.”

McClintock notes that Us, Us, Us demands more than static viewership; instead, the visitor must navigate veiled areas to access the project in its entirety. “By entering the space,” she writes, “you have become part of it.” It’s a claim familiar from a good deal of art after Minimalism, but in this case holds true; it also feels conceptually appropriate to a practice focused on the interplay of individual and group. Examining the fantasy of a subjective universe indulged by the self-help industry – a relentlessly positivist field in which, to borrow the title of Thomas Harris’s 1969 pop-psych bestseller, I’m OK – You’re OK – Cachemaille ponders how a greater commonality with other human beings and the cosmos might look and feel.

Cachemaille also characterises herself as an animist. It’s an old term but, in the context of emergent theories such as Object-Oriented Ontology, might be one due for a revival. The idea that animals, plants, and even non-living things have a spiritual essence doesn’t seem so far removed from the critique of our still relentlessly human-centred worldview propounded by philosopher Timothy Morton in his focus on complex “hyper-objects.” But the artist doesn’t accept animism unflinchingly; when Cachemaille works, as she often has, with found objects, any appeal to magical thinking is tempered by an implied critique of the idea that the natural world could be anything but indifferent. Yet she still believes in a kind of (for want of a better word) magic.

The conversation extracted at the start of this text also sees Cachemaille discuss – with writer Jaimee Stockman-Young – animism’s deeper history as an anthropological construct, exploring its relationship to colonialism and the history of  New Zealand. “How can we consider this concept as part of  ‘New Age’ spiritualism,” asks Stockman-Young, “when ideas like this existed within Kaupapa Māori long before our ancestors took this land and in many other indigenous cultures, or cultures outside of Western influence?” “I am exploring the possibility that we are all animists,” responds the artist. “As Bruno Latour said, ‘we have never been modern.’ The idea that the world of objects and world of subjects are separate has always been an illusion.”

Cachemaille has mined this condition in a series of exhibitions at Sanderson Contemporary over the past few years. Most recently Feel Up! (October 2016) saw her transform the gallery into something resembling the site of an encounter group. The artist introduced participants to such intriguing objects as Collaboration Cloth I and II, unstretched canvases painted with large black arrows and punctured by holes that invite the insertion of limbs and heads, resulting in shared costumes that force their wearers into awkward, angular, Twister-esque intimacy. Such objects – or simply “things” as Cachemaille prefers to call them – combine irresistibly comic physical situations with a serious dialogue around collective action, thought, and feeling.

In Same As It Ever Was (February 2016), Cachemaille presented constructions and collages that reached not for a shared consciousness, but instead for a common and/or alternate past, sketched out in material to hint at archetypal landscape. Combining studio bits and bobs with other discarded objects, the artist turned her unnamed site into a battleground, exploiting the various tensions – violent, erotic and otherwise – that are invariably conjured up by found articles of clothing. Viewers weren’t called upon to involve themselves in quite as direct a way as Feel Up! would later demand, but the primacy of the body was again the show’s subject and structure. The idea of animism played a part too, reminding us of the non-inertness of  ‘inert’ matter.

Two years further back, and we come to 2014’s Active Agents/Passive Matter, in which illusionistic paintings of iron pyrite – a.k.a. “fool’s gold” – signalled a familiar disjunction between materials’ demonstrable use value and the various kinds of symbolic status with which we invest them. The artist refers here to W.T.J. Mitchell’s 2005 book What Do Pictures Want?, which discusses “double consciousness,” our tendency to relate to images as if they were alive while simultaneously denying their influence. According to Mitchell – and to Cachemaille – art has lost none of its magical power, even if we are in denial of the fact. And so the artist’s practice goes, raising ideas around the visual and the tactile, questioning what we expect “things” to do for us – and what happens when we leave them to their own devices.           

Essay by Mike Wilson

BIOGRAPHY

BORN: 1971, Nelson

LIVES: Nelson

EDUCATION: Post Graduate Diploma in Art and Design, Auckland University of Technology; Bachelor of Arts, University of Otago; Diploma in Visual Arts, Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology

AWARDS: Molly Morpeth Canaday 3D Award Merit Prize 2018, Molly Morpeth Canaday 2D Award Merit Prize 2017, Wallace Art Awards Jury Prize 2016 (Collaborative project), National Contemporary Art Awards Merit Prize 2016 (Collaborative project), The Wallace Art Awards Finalist 2014, 2016, 2018, Best Visual Arts Award, Dunedin Fringe Festival 2008

COLLECTIONS: The Suter Art Gallery Te Aratoi o Whakatu, Nelson, The James Wallace Arts Trust, Auckland

PUBLIC EXHIBITIONS:

2022

Everybody SoundSystem, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space - Upcoming

Be Soft Be Strong, Sanderson Contemporary, Auckland

Back to the Garden, Service Depot, Threads Textiles Festival, Wellington

2021

This Way That Way solo presentation, Dowse Art Museum, Wellington

Back to Life presentation, Te Ramaroa Festival, Nelson Whakatu.

2020

Thinking About Thinking About The Future, group exhibition, Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, Titirangi, Auckland

High hopes installation, Viewfinder Project Space, Nelson

She’s a Force solo, Sanderson Contemporary, Auckland

Material Slip group show, University of Wyoming Art Museum, Wyoming, USA

2019

New Zealand Presentation Beijing Biennale 2019, Beijing, China

Sanderson Contemporary Art at Sydney Art Fair, Australia

OLD ENERGIES project installation, Wallace Arts Trust Pah Homestead, Auckland

Material Slip group show, The University of Wyoming Art Museum

The 27th Annual Wallace Art Awards 2019: Exhibition of Winners and Finalists, Pah Homestead, Auckland, Pataka Art and Museum, Wellington, The Suter Gallery, Nelson; and CoCA, Christchurch.

2018 

FEELS installation, Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, Auckland

MY RELICS NOT MY RELICS solo, Sanderson Contemporary, Auckland.

Material Slip group show, The University of Hawai’i, Honolulu, Hawai’i.

Finalist Exhibition: The Molly Morpeth Canaday Awards, Whakatane Museum and Arts.

2017 

US, US, US solo show, The Suter Te Aratoi o Whakatu, Nelson, New Zealand 

Finalist Exhibition: The Molly Morpeth Canaday Awards, Whakatane Museum and Arts.

The 26th Annual Wallace Art Awards 2017: Exhibition of Winners and Finalists, Pataka Art and Museum, Wellington.

Sanderson Contemporary Art at Sydney Art Fair, Australia

2016 

FEEL UP! solo, Sanderson Contemporary, Auckland.

Same as it ever was solo show, Sanderson Contemporary, Auckland.

The 25th Annual Wallace Art Awards 2016: Exhibition of Winners and Finalists,  Pah Homestead Auckland, and Wallace Gallery Morrinsville

The National Contemporary Art Awards FInalists 2016, Waikato Museum, Hamilton.

2014 

Active Agents / Passive Matter solo show, Sanderson Contemporary, Auckland

Sanderson Contemporary Art at Melbourne Art Fair, Australia

The 23rd Annual Wallace Art Awards 2016, Pah Homestead, Auckland

Testing Testing solo show, Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology, Nelson

Tools of the Trade group show, Paul Nache Gallery, Gisborne

2013 

Give me the light solo show, Sanderson Contemporary Art, Auckland

Cruel City, group show, The Suter Te Aratoi o Whakatu, Nelson

Sanderson Contemporary Art at Auckland Art Fair

2012 

I can change solo show, Sanderson Contemporary Art, Auckland

Creep group show, Sanderson Contemporary Art, Auckland

2011 

Recover solo show, Nelson Marlborough Institute ofTechnology Gallery, Nelson

Sanderson Contemporary Art at Auckland Art Fair

2010 

Artist in Focus at The Suter Te Aratoi o Whakatu, Nelson

Salvation solo show, Sanderson Contemporary, Auckland

Are You Positive? solo show, Corridor Gallery: experimental art space, Nelson

2009 

The Universe Will Provide! solo show, Red Gallery, Nelson

Self Help solo show, Sanderson Contemporary, Auckland

Far Far Away group show curated by Karl Chitham at Rawene Public Art Gallery

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: