Born Hertfordshire, United Kingdom.
Contact: joshua.bilton@googlemail.com
2008 - 2010 MA Photography, Royal College of Art, London
2004 - 2007 BA (Hons) Photography, London College of Communication, London
I am a visual artist making socially engaged artwork through workshops, ceremony and mixed media. My process is to learn through communities and nature, often working with a community group for a period of one to two years in response to a landscape or environment.
During the past 5 years, I have been researching how my socially engaged practice can help communities reflect on environmental care and self-care through nature, animism and mythology. This work has taken place in long-term commissions at the Wellcome Collection, Kettle’s Yard, Tate Exchange, The Canal and River Trust, St George’s Hospital and Cambridge University Hospitals. Recent bursaries through DYCP and a-n have given me the vital opportunity to intensively experiment with new ways of working communally using performance, choreography, text, ancient shamanic practices, ceramics, casting, photography and 16mm video.
Through 13 years of experience as a lead artist facilitator, I have grown a deep understanding of the adaptability needed to work with a range of community needs, ages and situations. These have included working with children with special educational needs, adults experiencing poor mental health, care homes, cancer and paediatric wards in hospitals, community groups facing dementia and environmental initiatives in areas of low social mobility in London. Alongside this, I have extensive experience in planning, monitoring, documenting, delivering and evaluating workshop programmes through my role as a lead facilitator and Senior Tutor at the Kings Foundation and Visiting Practitioner at the University Arts London.
During my work in hospitals in the past 2 years, my practice-based research has explored how art can function as a method of tackling isolation to instil a greater sense of wellbeing in the healing process. This has brought me into contact with many people who face challenges, which can create huge barriers for engagement. My role as an artist facilitator has been focused on finding ways of allowing each person into the creative process in stages that respond to their self-confidence. Through this, I have learnt a great deal about the essential role art can play in using non-verbal gestures as a means of helping people express abstract and complex feelings of anxiety, isolation, escapism, value, nurture and belonging.
I am currently an Honorary Artist at Cambridge University Hospitals. Senior Core Tutor on The King’s Foundation programme. Associate Artist at Kettle’s Yard and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. Visiting Practitioner at the London College of Communication on the BA (Hons) Photography programme.