Josephine Cachemaille (b. 1971, New Zealand Aotearoa) is an award-winning installation artist who makes paintings, objects and assemblages. She approaches art-making as a place to engage with non-human things as bodies with needs, desires and agency. She describes objects, materials and media as “collaborators” who know things and have the capacity to act. Cachemaille’s installations often offer sustained scenarios for sensuous engagement with the artworks, playfully asking viewers to enter into the explicitly anthropomorphic activity that underpins her methodology. In this sense, she is exploring the potential of art-making as kind of relational ontology, where dominant ways of “knowing” the world are challenged.

Josephine has a degree in Psychology and a post-graduate diploma in Fine Art. She has won the Wallace Art Award Jury Prize (2016), The National Contemporary Awards Merit Prize (2016), and Molly Morpeth Canaday 3D (2018) and 2D (2017) Merit Prizes. Cachemaille has had multiple solo and public exhibitions nationally and internationally. She lives in Nelson Whakatu, New Zealand with her husband music journalist Grant Smithies.