Joya: AiR / Josephine Cachemaille / NZL

“Joya: AiR is remote, a collection of beautifully rebuilt farmhouses, encircled by ambitious permaculture earthworks, projects with gardens and orchards, gray water filtering systems, and a semi-constructed freshwater modernist pool oasis. All of this is surrounded by dry clay hills punctured with wilding Aleppo pines, Quercus oaks, thistles, wild herbs, and heat.

My residency was during high summer, and the journey by bus to Joya: AiR through entirely unfamiliar landscape left me feeling vulnerable. The land felt exhausted: endless olive and almond orchards, White Poplar forestry blocks, limestone and marble quarries, and abandoned farms.

While I had solicited the residency for the usual reasons - to disrupt my studio-based practice, to introduce new conditions under which to make, to shake the tree - this vulnerability was still uncomfortable.

My response was to turn to materials and processes that might connect me to the landscape, to make gentle gestures in the hope that this tough, gutsy place would become familiar and friendly. I walked in the mornings before the sun was intense, picking herbs - crushing them, wearing them next to my body - and later under my pillow when I slept. I collected stones to make soft red and yellow pigments to paint calico, and mixed earth into clay to fashion into a surrogate arm and hand that I could lay down onto the thorny ground. I swam in the late afternoons to cool off and calm down.

The somatic nature of these actions nurtured conditions conducive to thinking through tender things. This approach opened channels of connection and attachment and gave me fresh, painful insight into the deep dependency I have on the non-human world.

Everyone I met at Joya: AiR was brave, and while Joya is a retreat, a withdrawal from norms, it is also a frontier in which to venture out into unknowns”.

Josephine Cachemaille

For years I have approached materials as sensuous bodies with needs, desires and agency, but only recently have begun to understand that my making processes and the final assemblages themselves (often composite bodies and beings) kindle attachments and enduring affectionate relationships. My current work is concerned with nurture, care and healing. My practice has become an important site to explicitly hope and be optimistic; to cope with anxieties; and to form attachments and connections - with humans and non-human materials alike.

I work with a range of media to create installations comprising soft and hard sculpture, paintings and assemblages. The manipulation of these components and their relationships in the studio result in installations that function as psychological landscapes that I can examine, order, and arrange as I think through tender things,

Simon Beckmann26 September 2023