Sanderson are pleased to present the exhibition New Psychic Life by Josephine Cachemaille.
A tenderly rendered facial fragment. An intensely arched body. One pointed foot protruding from geometric tubing. A single brushstroke tracing a sinuous knot down an expanse of black calico.
In New Psychic Life Josephine Cachemaille draws together an oblique range of symbolic objects to articulate the contours of her interior landscape. There is something intrinsically unknowable about interiority, in both bodily and psychic forms. Cachemaille turns to these spaces in which we dwell – our bodies and our unconscious minds – and sifts through their fragments to unearth something relational, something generative, something invitational.
Using a variety of materials which have cycled in and out of her practice, Cachemaille translates her interior psychic terrain into physical form. The resulting landscape is densely populated: there is the Worrier, at once figure and vessel, his finely wrought head a stopper, placed there to contain the worries poured within. There is The Sage, the hairpin curve of their body fraught with tensile strain, their face drawn in an intense expression of weariness. There is Hubris, his columnar body a monument draped in silk which hand-dyed in plant dye made from the Immortelle plant (Helichrysum italicum) grown by Cachemaille herself.
Despite the symbolic clues offered by these materials and their titles, these figures evade the grasping hand of definition. Their symbolism remains stubbornly – satisfyingly – oblique. The figures and forms which populate New Psychic Life have emerged from Cachemaille’s recent experimentation with self-directed meditation. Loosely inspired by the Jungian practice of active imagination, a form of meditation intended to bridge the unconscious and conscious realms. She explains that this process ‘seems to activate archetypal images from my unconscious, to bring them into the present so I can examine them, understand them, do something with them.’
Material experimentation lies at the heart of this process. Working with fabric, clay, natural dyes and wood, Cachemaille maps interiority in a way that renders it tangibly material. Often, she will present materials in different modes to explore the rich gamut of their textural and affective power. Clay, for instance, is seen in Worrier and Hubris as unglazed bisque, its porous earthen warmth illuminating the figures it shapes. In other works, it has been fired in a wood-burning Anagama kiln, the unpredictable blackening of its heat resulting in an almost metallic finish. And in Immortelle it has been shaped into delicate wood-fired buttons, rigid and bone-like against the taught skin of calico fabric.
These points of material difference and connection exert a visual and tactile pull as we traverse the space, tracing material from object to object. We follow, too, the gaze of each figure from body to body, object to object. These points of connection pull disparate forms together in relation: they become a constellation, a landscape, a cosmology. Cachemaille invites us to navigate through this landscape, to bring our own interiority to bear on these fragments unearthed from her own psychic life and to ask if – and how – they might speak to us.
- Dr Kirsty Baker
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