About

Josie’s work can take many forms – from sculpture and film to workshops, public conversations, community and political organising, and vibrant events. Through poetic approaches to meeting one another and tracing the roots of our struggles and desires, she invites us to imagine and take collective action towards bringing to life possible futures.

Based in Bradford, Josie has experience in long term embedded community work, care work, learning by doing, art research projects, delivering training, performing, and making art with others. She has a BA in Interactive Arts and is partway through an MSc in Art Psychotherapy. 

Her art and poetry are rallying sites for community learnings, tensions, transformations and joys.

Publications, Talks, Interviews

We first reached for the the phrase ‘uncertain times’, ‘we are living in uncertain times’. But as we held this phrase we had reached for, it didn’t feel like it fit. No, we live in threatening times. We are watching the wave of increased fascist riots and racist targeted violence in the UK. As this happened, the genocide of Palestinian people continues to escalate and yesterday there are 40,000 reported dead. As the global world continues to stretch beyond crisis, the local remains a site of struggle, where inequality and oppression is manifest, faced and felt deeply. When we connect with people internationally it cracks something open and we understand how the struggles we face locally are shared, where the roots are and what our responsibilities could be, to keep working for a more just world. Everywhere is a site of oppression, so everywhere we must meet it with honesty: globally, in the street, within our communities, in intimate relations and within ourselves. By connecting through wellbeing, we are resisting the suffocation of intersecting oppressions, and creating space to breathe and imagine, collectively creating futures out of impossibility. When we are stuck, community wellbeing is our route as well as our destination.

Carving out Community Ownership and Collective Futures in Threatening Times, a conversation between Community Wellbeing Collective Members and Momentum International Delegates, August 2024

“We are learning that there is a need to address our material and social barriers to involvement in research and mental health treatment. And for our involvement to be directly democratic, the means of knowledge production, and the resources for healing, would to be collectivised. To take on this revolution in mental health research, treatment, and beyond we will need to engage with the art of imagining together!

Research As A Healing Practice, Community Wellbeing Collective Publication 2024

“Loving non-monogamously doesn’t inherently make us activists. It does, however, widen our aperture for what a world liberated from intersecting oppressive systems might look like. With more people, you can make a bigger banner.”

Connections in the cold, The Skinny, article by Maria Morava, 2023

“Lost boys, there’s nowhere for you to return to. No place awaiting you but the one we build.”

Letter to the lost boys, Transformative Justice Zine, Spit it Out, Edited by Jj Fadaka, 2023

Selected Work