Capsule is pleased to present Boundary, Nicki Cherry’s (b.1992 Indiana, USA; lives and works in New York, USA) first solo exhibition in China. Weaving together sculpture, sound, and olfactory elements, the artist reflects on the mutable threshold between the conscious and subconscious, the seen and unseen, the self and the other.
The negotiation of boundaries begins with Cherry’s sculptural process itself. By coating plants, ephemeral objects and their own body in materials such as plaster bandages and metal deposits, the artist creates shells that function as second skins–the very membranes that separate self from other, interior from exterior. Yet these boundaries remain permeable, neither fully separating nor securely containing what lies on either side. Cherry’s figural and botanical forms seem perpetually hovering in moments of becoming: wounded and healing, melting and shapeshifting, decaying and regenerating. The works give form to visceral sensations and private experiences that otherwise resist articulation.
In Open Wide (2026), fragments of plaster bandage molded from the artist’s body have been joined into an ungainly, gaping mass. A zipper runs along its opening, suggesting an anatomy that can be unfastened, while a crimson handprint presses deeply into its reverse–an impression that might register either harm or support. A cannula connects the sculpture to a cast-iron heart, partially collapsed as though softened by heat.
On the nearby windowsill, After Desire (2026) presents a more intact version of the same cardiac form. Rendered with the clinical precision of an anatomical model, this hardened yet vulnerable organ possesses an uncanny lifelikeness, as though one might still hear it pumping blood through an absent body. Both forms are cast from remnants of an earlier work, Desire Stages (2024), in which heart-shaped scented candles burned within the chest of a sculptural body. Like still frames extracted from a moving image, these static forms arrest the sensations of desire, preserving material traces of a transient process that has already elapsed.
Surgical in its precision, Cherry’s orchestration of details heightens dramatic tension and emotional intensity through nuanced gestures, unexpected implants, and carefully considered material assemblages. In Holding Pattern (2025), a truncated torso hangs from a steel handle, its weight borne by a single chain descending from the ceiling. One limb stretches upward while the other folds into repose, recalling the suspended figure of the Hanged Man in tarot. While commonly interpreted as an action of self-sacrifice, his inversion also offers a new perspective on familiar circumstances. Unlike the figure on the card, who hangs by one foot, the impossible body here terminates in hands rather than feet. Though its grip has been released, the hand remains inseparable from the apparatus that supports it. The figure’s stasis is less passively endured than actively willed–a conscious refusal to let go.
Across the sculpture’s pigmented gypsum cement surface, scab-like formations reveal themselves, upon closer inspection, to be blister pearls. A less popular cousin of the free pearl, the blister pearl, induced by a foreign irritant or injury inside the mollusk, grows attached to the shell. Clingy and unwanted, yet tender and otherworldly, it becomes a metaphor for emotional excess, bodily vulnerability, and the strange ways in which inner experience manifests on the surface of the body.
Scattered throughout the same space are sculptures of blossoming flora from the Trepan series (2026). Copper-plated tulips emerge upwards from black stoneware rocks, poised between botanical delicacy and mineral hardness. Through the electroplating process, this group of Trepans has acquired unexpectedly vivid, saturated patinas. Rather than sealing the copper against further change, the artist has left the surfaces exposed to continued alteration. Beneath the metal, dried plant matter remains preserved, its flesh enclosed within a hard, iridescent skin. The result is neither a living flower nor a memorial to one, but a form suspended between preservation and transformation, dormancy and emergence. Its surface records a process that has not necessarily reached its conclusion; within, a latent vitality persists.
This psychological garden extends into the exhibition’s second room. As the tulips transition from flourishing bloom to wilting decay, we move from the realm of the conscious toward the subconscious. The tulip stems, bulbs, and blossoms no longer sprout upward but hang from copper chains like botanical specimens. Repeated across the walls, the flowers undergo a kind of semantic saturation: as the motif proliferates, its conventional associations lose their interpretive stability, giving way to more ambiguous meanings.
To unravel Cherry’s symbolism of the tulip and the rock, we must return to their point of reference. The artist’s ongoing engagement with the tulip began with Hieronymus Bosch’s The Extraction of the Stone of Madness (also known as Cutting the Stone), a painting depicting a supposed surgical procedure of trepanation in which a physician cuts into a man’s head to extract the physical cause of his folly. It draws on the medieval misbelief that madness could be cured by removing a stone from the skull. Yet Bosch’s substitution of a tulip-like flower for the expected stone lends the scene its dark humor, satirizing credulity, dubious authority, and false wisdom about the body and mind. Rather than treating mental experience as a straightforward symptom of physiological disorder, Bosch’s image exposes the absurdity of a cure grounded in an overly literal understanding of the mind. Its satire resonates with the longer history of attempts to discipline aberrations, from invasive treatments for hysteria to efforts to alter homosexuality through medical intervention. In their respective historical contexts, such practices reveal how expectations of bodily conduct can become entangled with moral judgment and social convention. Like their fifteenth-century predecessor, Cherry probes the unstable boundary between the pathological and the healthy, the natural and the repressed, outward manifestations and underlying drives.
The tulip thus becomes a symbol of the subconscious, the internal experiences, and the impulses that blossom within the body. The history of the tulip introduces another dimension to this tension. Beyond its association with irrationality through the Dutch Tulip Mania, the flower’s cultivation has long depended on human manipulation. Some of its most coveted variations emerged through viral infection, producing unexpected streaks and breaks of color. The very irregularities that made these flowers desirable were symptoms of disease. Beauty and pathology become inseparable.
Tulips also embody the dynamic between visible and concealed. Hidden underground through the winter, their bulbs remain out of sight, accumulating momentum for growth until the time comes to break through the soil. The Trepans evoke this uneasy alliance between control and unpredictability, repression and liberation, unseen processes and their eventual manifestations.
Further enigmatizing this immersive dreamscape are the freestanding ceramic sculptures that inhabit the same room. Hybrids of vessels and human bodies rest atop white-tiled platforms, their semilustrous skins rendered in sickly shades of green and interrupted by bruises of pink. Latex tubes pierce its surface, while pendulous breasts and amputated arms evoke trauma, mortality and tenacity of life. Fluid and muddy, these ceramic figures seem to leap from the ancient Chinese myth of Nüwa, the goddess who created humankind from droplets of clay. Their pliant bodies are only just awakening to sensation, each impression registering with an almost heightened clarity. Consciousness remains hazy and fluid, not yet crystallized into distinct thoughts or coherent patterns of logic. These figures are neither portraits nor straightforward fantasies, but attempts to give shape to the mind’s less legible operations: its involuntary associations, irrational images, and currents of feeling that precede conscious reasoning.
In My Spectre of You and Your Spectre of Me (both 2026), the figures, like many of Cherry’s sculptures, are faceless, yet somehow seem to convey facial expressions. Their deformed bodies settle into a dynamic equilibrium grounded in shared vulnerability. They inhabit an unsettled space of mutual construction, where intimacy can produce recognition as readily as distortion. The self, in Cherry’s work, is less a fixed entity than something continually negotiated between bodies.
The artist’s investigation of corporeal experience extends beyond visual representation to engage multisensory perception. Pupa (2026) diffuses a custom-made fragrance that blends milky, floral, and green notes with a faint suggestion of rot, evoking the state of a chrysalis. The aroma chemicals emitted by butterflies are surprisingly, yet naturally, similar to those of flowers. The pollinator and the nectar source converge through their interdependence, much as humans mirror the gestures, expressions, speech patterns, and ideologies of those to whom they are attracted. In this reciprocal movement, the boundary between self and other becomes blurred, as desire manifests not only as an impulse to approach but also as a tendency to absorb, imitate, and become like the desired other.
Beneath the platform supporting Pupa, a low, resonant sound emanates from a drain set into the plinth. Developed from a recording the artist made behind a waterfall in Iceland, the composition features deep rumbles punctuated by distant, subdued horns. In the gallery, the sound seems to arrive from somewhere below the architecture–from the depth of the earth or the abyss of the imagination.
Liquid threads through the exhibition not as a substance, but as an association. The cannula evokes the circulation of bodily fluids, while the drain and faucet interspersed among the white tiled-platforms conjure the setting of a bathroom. Bodily fluids, whether shed through crying, bleeding, sweating, or other forms of secretion, mark the body’s permeability. They are often bound to feelings of shame, pain, and unease. However, what might been deemed abject in the public sphere can lead to release, purification and renewal when processed in privacy.
Through an interplay of the visceral and the elusive, Boundary prompts experiences that are felt before they can be understood, and reflects on the porous nature of thresholds. Wounds give rise to new forms; what appears dormant stirs beneath the surface; what logic casts out may return as a flux of visions and thoughts. The boundary, then, is where the self encounters what it cannot fully grasp, where desire unsettles certainty, injury opens onto transformation, and the unfamiliar becomes intimately felt. What emerges from this permeability is empathy: an attunement to the vulnerability of others, born of the recognition that the limits separating us are never entirely anchored.
