#17 Sherry Zheng's 3 objects
"At what point did things from my childhood get cast away, and are they more important to me now that I can’t recover them?"
Objectively is a weekly series about our objects and the stories they tell. Leading with curiosity, the project views objects as an extension and embodiment of humanity, and hopes that exploring our relationship with them gives us new understandings of ourselves.
Today’s feature is part of Living with Objects, a sub-series featuring a person and 3 objects - in response to a selection of questions about relating to, interacting with, and consuming things.
Read on about Sherry Zheng, a photographer in Sydney, recounting a time long gone, sharing about her cup-collecting habit, and letting us in on what she’d love to reincarnate as. She also took film photos for this feature and they’re so tender and lovely.
Sherry Zheng is a Chinese-Australian photographer living and based in Sydney. She explores themes of identity and family in her personal photography work. She loves to cook, feed, and be fed.
Look back on an object that you used to interact with often, but no longer. Can you tell us more about it?
A set of pink and blue throw blankets (毯子) that lived in my childhood home. Thick and woven, they were patterned with Chinese motifs - I can’t remember for sure what it was, maybe flowers or dragons hah. A cool layer on warm summer nights, an extra layer during winter nights, a thing of comfort that I never paid much attention to.
I moved away from home and never thought about them again - until I moved back with the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. But I moved back into a family home I’d never lived in before, so it was a strange version of nostalgia where memories trickled back slowly (they still continue to) as other markers like the sound of native birds at dusk or smells of old notebooks and report cards involuntarily trigger. Those blankets themselves don’t mean much, but once the memory was triggered, their absence was jarring.
At what point did things from my childhood get cast away, and are they more important to me now that I can’t recover them? I thought about where they came from, the sense of home associated with them. I thought about it so much so that it prompted the start of a photo project that I find myself working on these days - called Cocoon.
How about an everyday object that you still interact with? What do you think life would be without it?
My cups - I love to bring home tea cups, mugs, coffee cups of all kinds from everywhere, and always in pairs. Even when moving countries I’d never compromise those fragile vessels. One pair is a set of small, round, sake cups made by a friend who I used to teach English to while living in Tokyo. The most recent pair is a little blue set of coffee cups with handles, made of clay intertwined, which I bought while traveling solo in Pondicherry.
While some live at the back of my cupboard at home for special occasions, one beloved pair of ‘wobbly’ tea cups I use every day, either to drink my morning coffee or tea in. They are unique and globular, beautiful and grotesque - kind of what I’d imagine the inside of a throat or colon to look like. On days I rush out of the house early for work, I take them into my car so I can drink my coffee while stuck in the traffic. As you can imagine coffee splashes everywhere.
My life would be much the same without them to be honest, but ultimately it's these objects that make up my daily rituals making the sometimes transient places I move through feel like home.
Now imagine you could be any object, what would you want to be?
There is this big ceramic sculpture, it actually belongs to my partner but I love it so much and cannot really explain why… nor why I would want to be it. It’s both smooth and rough, has two ‘ears’ which poke out resembling Miffy, but it’s less a character and more of a thing of its own.
This used to sit by the window in a room that reminded me of a sailboat or submarine, and it would be the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes in the morning. Something about it emanated calmness - a perfect and empty canvas that upon closer inspection had bumps and texture, like pores on skin. While I’m largely drawn to it for its aesthetic features, I’d love to be reincarnated as an object like this - more or less a thing, but with big and quiet presence.
Photography by Sherry Zheng
Follow Sherry @dontcallmesheryl and @dontcallmeshellyeither, and check out her website.
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Coming up for our next Object Talks, we have Wee Ling Soh on selling French everyday objects. Subscribe for free to receive it first in your inbox: