Josie Durant

Josie Durant is a UK-based artist living and working in East Sussex. She is currently studying a Masters in Print at the Royal College of Art. She is the recipient of the Leverhulme Trust Arts Scholarship for her Masters degree. She previously received a 1st class honours Bachelors degree in Fine Art: Printmaking from the University of Brighton.

Durant’s artistic practice utilises expanded print media, exploring notions of ‘the body’. Her work is grounded in photographic print processes, but spans sound, videography, drawing and installation. This culminates in engaging multi-disciplinary works that distort and contradict through mixed-media layering.

Drawing from my archive of images, sound, video recordings, drawings and prints from my own body, I use my body as material to explore a sense of physical being in the world. 

Disassociated through the process of my practice, there evolves a strange and transcendental new body. Exploring themes around consciousness and numinosity through this vessel, my artistic practice speaks from the liminal territory between material states. The vessel is a tangible and intangible body that moves through and within physical spaces, as metaphor and myth to discover new meaning.

Aesthetics of self portraiture and representations of the human body become tools for contemplating the relationship between body and self. Our evolving digital, biological imagery reveals an impossible, artificial body that further questions notions of the self in the digital age. My work combines historical and mythological notions of self and spirit with this future digital body, to contemplate spirituality and representations of the numinous in contemporary art practice.

Colour and light play an important role in the aesthetics of my work. I find pink an intriguing extra-spectral colour with associations that are both human and artificial. I implement light as material in the making and display of my work, to further reference this future spirituality that sits between human form and artificial fictions. 

The experience of this ambiguous imagery invokes a sense of unease while still holding a gentle intimacy within it; weaving threads of trauma, femininity, mythology and mortality.