Robert Leonard talks to Derrick Cherrie about his show at Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland. Thursday 4 July 1991.
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Robert Leonard: These new works look like toys. 
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Derrick Cherrie: They’ve been dubbed the ‘nursery works’, but they’re not simply toys. The size is important. They’re all overblown, obviously adult in scale. They’re not meant for children. They’re for adults. They deal with an adult notion of childhood. Toys are an adult thing. It’s adults who make them, not children. The child playing with toys is operating within an adult-constructed idea of childhood. The interesting thing is that it must be the image we adults have of our own childhood.
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What kind of a place is the nursery? And why are you interested in it?
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Ideally, the nursery is a place of nurture. The nursery seems comfortable. It’s full of soft, cuddly, pretty, friendly things. But they’re all about socialisation. So the nursery is also a frightening place. The child is like sponge. It’s pushed and squeezed, and it soaks stuff up. The reality of this pushing and squeezing, just who pushes and who squeezes, how and why, the areas beyond the parent/child relationship that are implicated in this process—that’s what I’m curious about. I’m sure the soaking doesn’t cease when the squeezing stops. The nursery is a room of fun. But just what sort of fun, and in whose terms it is defined as fun—that’s interesting to me.
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So, what role do toys play in this environment?
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The nursery is designed to extend, restrict, and channel the child. The parent-child relationship is tempered with toys. Toys are messages from the adult to the child. Lessons. They prepare the child to enter the adult world. But toys can also be misused, abused, punished. They can be outlets for the child’s wayward desires in relation to its parents and a world that never lets down its guard.
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How do these ideas work through a particular piece? Give us an example.
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One of the works, The Soft Chain, is a chain made of fabric and stuffed like a soft toy. It’s like a toy chain. The links are different sizes and covered in different fabrics, so there are a whole range of associations to pick up on. Some of the links are made of velvet, like the rope barriers in a bank. They look incredibly sensuous to touch. Some of the links are covered in a cheap cotton, printed with lassos and ten gallon hats—a fabric clearly designed for children. The piece seems folksy, like  patchwork quilt. But, as a chain, it is also S’n’M—it’s an adult device in the guise of a toy.
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The chain is symbolic of the social order, but your chain is not particularly orderly.
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The chain looks bunched and uneven. This disorder represents a certain kind of freedom, an unrestrictedness, a randomness. And yet the links are all connected, all constrained. There is one spare link, but it, too, is caught up in the chain. My idea is that a certain amount of slack and disorder is allowed, in fact its an integral part of the system. It helps preserve the system. The chain is metaphor for a social order that permits various freedoms, but the chain is also a prison.
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The soft chain is fastened to the floor and ceiling with lengths of steel chain.
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Some people like to be tied up with velvet ropes, soft ropes that won’t injure them. Sometimes just the idea of bondage is enough. When I put the soft chain together with a hard chain, the question I am asking is: which one is the most constricting?
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What about the steel chains in the other pieces?
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In The Soft Chain, the chain is the work. In the other pieces, the chains become tethers on the works. They imply threat, restraining their objects like savage dogs. From my early studies in art history, I liked the idea of sculpture extending out into the space, patrolling it. Ironically, by chaining up the works I make them more threatening, suggesting that they can reach the end of their tethers.
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What about the drain holes?
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The drain holes first became important in my bed works. There, they refer specifically to human waste, the by-products of whatever activity might happen on the beds. In the nursery works, the waste reference is not so specific. It is not clear what the holes are supposed to be draining. What is clear is that this unwanted substance is floating around in the gallery, around the viewer. Sometimes the drain holes create more specific ironies. Extended Wear looks like a life ring. It looks as if it could float away, carrying you to safety; within the limits of the chain, of course. And yet it also suggests this potential to absorb what it’s supposed to be carrying you away from. It’s a rescue vehicle, but also a trap you would want to be rescued from. I also like the fact that it is so small. Its potential for absorption doesn’t seem to physically relate to the space around it.
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Interesting. If the size of the work determines the amount it can absorb, the number of holes would control the rate at which it can absorb.
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Extended Wear is incredibly comprehensive when it comes to absorbing. It’s small, but it has more drain holes than any other work. Plugs are chained to the holes, suggesting you can stop the absorption whenever you like. The holes work in the other way too. They suggest that the works can leak.
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The body also absorbs and excretes things.
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There are a lot of bodily references in the works. Not only are my works offered as things for the body to get onto and into, in some ways they resemble the body itself, or its parts. So people relate to them in two different ways. One is identification, the work becomes their body. The other way is that they can physically jump on the works, get into them, ride them, assault them, like they’re someone else’s body. But, what particularly interests me is that there’s often no clear demarcation between these ways. They’re blurred, so that, at times, it could be like a self-assault.
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Is the idea of self-assault there in Casual Therapy? What do you intend it as therapy for?
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That work has an intestinal quality. I like the way it relates to the architecture. It’s connected to the floor with metal fittings and gaskets, giving it a plumbing aesthetic. The implication is that the beginning of the tube is somewhere else, under the floor, in another room. And the work is red and bloated, like there’s a big blockage in the pipe, and pressure’s building up, and it’s ready to explode. It’s an image of a physical blockage, but it suggests a mental or emotional blockage. At the same time, it looks like a big soft toy. It looks like something to play on or beat up. So Casual Therapy both pictures our frustration and offers itself as a punching bag for the release of it. That kind of contradiction. I hope that’s how all my works work.
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Robert Leonard talks to Derrick Cherrie about Supraluxe Suite, his project at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth. Saturday 6 July 1992.
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Robert Leonard: Supraluxe Suite seems to look back to the Proluxes. Was it a matter of unfinished business?
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Derrick Cherrie: My work over the last ten years has revolved around a particular set of ideas. And, of those ideas, different ones come to the surface at different times. Each new group of works suggests new aspects to consider in previous works. Supraluxe Suite does look back to the Proluxes. What’s new is that it deals with the issue of sexuality in a more social way. The Proluxes, and even works like Surface Tension and Retroflex, look like they could be used by one, maybe two, people. But with Supraluxe Suite, there is the potential for the work to be used by many people at the same time. That wasn’t there before.
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Why only one double bed and so many single ones? 
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That seemed a necessary balance. The double bed symbolises the conventional relationship, the relationship on which all other relationships and individualities are based. The double bed is the situation that you are supposed to move towards as you grow up. And I wanted the exhibition to question that ideal, that basic social assumption.
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How does it question it? 
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Through the variations in the single beds. At first, the single beds look like they’re simply repeating themselves, that each is just like the others. But, within their basic formal similarity, there’s also a whole gamut of differences. In some ways, they’re ridiculous differences, like having square corners or round corners, different padded elements on the bed, headboards or not. But, they establish a world of individuals within set parameters, whereas the double bed simply imposes a set narrative without variation. The fact that there are so many individuals challenges the credibility, the security, the necessity, of the double-bed situation.
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So the differences, are they supposed to be significant or insignificant?
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Both. It depends on how you look at the work. There is a tendency at first to take in everything—the beds downstairs, the models upstairs, the brochure, the Supraluxe logo—as one work. But then, as you spend more time, you want to make distinctions, to break everything down as a shopper might. You walk in and think, yeah, this is an interesting range. It’s only later that you start to think about what part of the range you’d best fit into, which part suits you. Slight differences between the beds—in say the relative quantity of hard to soft in each—distinguish them. They suggest that each bed might have a specific implication, suit a particular person, though what and whom is left to the imagination.
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I was surprised by the padded trims on the sides and ends of some of the big beds. 
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There’s an aspect of restraint there. I was very careful to recess the blocks of padding so that they looked like part of the mattress, so it looked like the mattress was being extruded out of openings in the hard container provided by the formica boxing. Again, I wanted to suggest that the beds are bodies themselves, as well as receptors for bodies.
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The single beds were marshalled together.
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They were all arranged in a large arc facing you as you come in. I was dealing with the presentation situation. Rather than presenting them as individual sculptural items to be walked around, I wanted, first, to offer them as a whole, a group, as one object. I was aware of the showroom phenomenon, where individual units don’t matter as much as the cumulative power and credibility of the range. The models upstairs were also arranged in an arc.
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I noticed there were more models than ‘real’ beds. 
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Some of them are the same as the beds below, but some of them are different. If you were going to make a range of furniture like this, you’d probably make countless models for it, especially if you were going to invest that much time and energy. But, I wanted to avoid the suggestion that the models were a prelude to manufacturing the life-size ones. I wanted to suggest the infinite extension of the range, as if the suite wasn’t complete here. Models are small. You can pick them up and move them. They’re innocent, unthreatening. But I wanted to turn all that around. You feel like a giant when you look at the models, and yet they overwhelm you because you can see the possible infinite extension of the range, beyond the present situation. You are reminded of your insignificance in the face of production.
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There are two spaces from which you can view the models.
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From the viewing platform provided by E deck, you are elevated and distanced. You have to decide if you want to go down that small staircase and enter their space. And, I guess, if you do, it’s on the anticipation of rewards, that there’s something you can get down there that you couldn’t get from the platform. Maybe it’s the hope … that you’ll become part of the Supraluxe world.
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[IMAGE: Derrick Cherrie Supraluxe Suite 1992]