Josephine Cachemaille's Profile

Josephine Cachemaille

"I come from a family who make things all the time. If you want to make something, you work out a way to do it using whatever skills and materials you have. This is how I work. I like the challenge of taking an idea and turning it into something. I don't always want to be masterful, I want there to be evidence of the process, the mistakes, the successes."


Background

Josephine Cachemaille was born in 1971 in Nelson. She gained a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the University of Otago in 1992 and went on to graduate with a Diploma in Visual Arts from the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology in 1996. She lives in Nelson with writer Grant Smithies and their 5 year old daughter Rosa.

In her art practice, Cachemaille uses ruminations on insecurity, ego and personal psychology to describe collective shared conditions and experiences. She is interested in the tension between the universal and those things that are specific/ personal/ trivial, using loaded images that describe both our individual shape and our greater collective state.

Josephine hunts for triggers – images and objects that feel familiar, deep, and central to describing who we are and what we are. Universal symbols and archetypes are peppered with the commonplace: suburban houses, streets, and amenity plantings.

Her paintings are often small, monochromatic and anxious. Hung in clusters, the paintings operate separately as individual images but also function to feed a greater mood. Both abstract and representational images comfortably cohabit her compositions, and the familiar and domestic rub up against the ominous and catastrophic.


In order to make her practice more engaging and accessible, Cachemaille also takes her work out of conventional gallery settings and into public spaces. She contructs miniature models of scenes and settlings- houses, tents, caravans, campfires, soundsystems- and installs these in parks and city streets for people to discover. At face value, these constructions are about wonder and surprise. Unearthing the tiny scenes is delightful for viewers, instantly engaging children and triggering adults' rusty imaginations. But these projects operate on other levels as well, encouraging people to look where they would typically overlook, "activating" public places and instilling them with fresh meaning and possibilities.

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