Make Believe

Cathedral Cabinet
28 July 2025

Imagine you’re a fish. You’re swimming in fresh, clean, salty ocean waters (actually they’re a bit warm and polluted, but anyway). You’re swimming, swimming, and there you see it, almost too good to be true: a shiny, hard-bodied thing, your favourite snack.


It’s a fish smaller than you, exactly your type of fish (you have a type), shimmying through the dappled water seductively, darting about in lively, jerking motions, just begging to be pursued and then—pounce—nibbled on. Its flesh is so shiny, so real, so tantalising. You swim closer, closer, closer, take a bite—OW, ARUGH AAAAGH OWWWW AAAAH NOOOOO—PAIN, PAIN, PAIN. You’re being yanked where you don’t want to be yanked; spears bloom in your cranium. You’re trying to move away but instead you’re being dragged up, up, up—FUCK—the fish was never a fish. It was just a lump of polycarbonate plastic painted with a holographic sheen designed to resemble scales, strung onto a line held by a human hand—AHHHHHH OWWWW—bright sunlight, hot air, dry skin. FLOP FLOP FLOP FLOP. It’s over.


A lure is a trick, its attributes designed to attract prey. Joseph Doggett-Williams’ works in Cathedral Cabinet are made up of scrappy, incongruous bits and bobs—pieces of plastic, chunks of faux fur, fishing floats, thermos parts, a lanyard—sutured together to form cryptic maquettes. They’re alluring. Bits that look like one thing reveal themselves, on closer inspection, to be something else entirely: what appears to be freshly cut mango is in fact sliced and diced sponge. On a metal and carved-wood contraption, the spiked tip of a hook pokes out from beneath a bejewelled snowflake and butterfly. Hairs sprout where they shouldn’t. Each tableau has a persona of sorts. Some are grotesque. Some are loveable. A section of a recorder, straight-backed and proud, takes on a punkish schoolboy affect with its stripey clownfish tie.


What’s the target of seduction here? Who is the prey? Maybe you don’t need to imagine you’re a fish. Maybe you already are the fish. You fell for it. Hook, line, and sinker—you took the bait.


Text by Cameron Hurst.