on becoming kamiphony

For more than three decades, Cybèle Young has created worlds from paper - sculptures, films, books, machines, and performances shaped by transformation, movement, and play. As a child, she collected insects, drawn to the uncanny way their delicate exoskeletons remained intact - suspended somewhere between object and living thing. That early fascination evolved into a lifelong attraction to the latent animacy of handmade forms, and toward cultural imaginations that exist beyond the strictly rational: worlds where forms carry spirit, ritual lives beside daily life, and the seen and unseen remain in constant dialogue.

Though her intricate paper works were often experienced behind glass, narrative and vitality continued to unfold through film, storytelling, puppetry, and play.

Kamiphony grew from a return to the kinetic works Young first explored over thirty years ago - a reunion with animation, rhythm, and the strange aliveness of handmade things - deepened by a pilgrimage to Japan tracing the origins of the washi paper at the centre of her practice.

As the work evolved, hand-turned mechanisms gave way to museum-scale cams, gears, hinges, and programmed motors, while sound entered the practice as both structure and atmosphere. Emerging alongside her first major public gallery exhibition in nearly two decades, the project allows these fragile forms to finally leave the frame - to move, gather, and interact within a shared space of rhythm, memory, fragility, and wonder.

Like imaginal cells within a chrysalis, the threads of Young’s practice - animacy, ritual, sound, performance, and shifting scale - reorganize here into a newly living form: one that moves between the intimate and monumental, the personal and collective, the microscopic and cosmic.