Josephine Cachemaiile: This Way That Way

Propped canvas works peppered with symbols, reaching bronze arms and large raw clay feet pave the way in This Way That Way, a new exhibition by Josephine Cachemaille, intended as well wishes and power objects to equip and enable her teenage daughter, Rosa, on her journey into adulthood.

With a tendency to anthropomorphise non-human ‘things’, and see objects, materials and media as collaborators who contribute and have the capacity to act, Cachemaille often tasks her installations and artworks with specific functions or roles. In this playful exhibition, unfired clay and semi-precious metal forms sit alongside symbolic paintings and soft sculpture suggestive of archetypal quests, pushed through a filter of Greek mythology, feminism and personal psychology.

Josephine has a degree in Psychology and a post-graduate diploma in Fine Art. She has won important awards and has had many solos and public exhibitions, including recent exhibitions Thinking About Thinking About the Future curated by Chloe Geoghegan, Te Uru Waitakere, Titirangi (2020), A Colourful World and A Shared Future, New Zealand Special Presentation at the Beijing Biennale (2019) and She’s A Force, Sanderson Contemporary, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland (2020). She lives in Whakatū Nelson, with her husband, music journalist Grant Smithies, and their daughter Rosa.