I need structure to function. I live with cystic fibrosis (CF) and I don’t have a job, so I’m used to creating my own structure. My daily routine is my personal scaffold, it keeps me regulated. Awake, coffee, meds, wash, moisturise, ready. 30works30days is the challenge by Artquest to make an artwork every day for a month in April. It helps me make new work and find new pathways. Here I’ll share four works I made in April 2024.
Day 1
Prompt: Renew and restart
Josh Philpott, Fool’s Egg, pencil on hen’s egg, 58 x 43 x 43 mm, 2024
On Monday 1 April, 2024, I read the first prompt for 30works30days in my inbox: “renew and restart”. With the wheel of the year grinding towards Spring, I commit to make 30 artworks daily for a month. I did it last year, so I’m excited for how helpful and generative this will be for me. It’s the perfect way to haul myself out of Winter hibernation. I find comfort in cycles, there is safety in rituals.
Since day 1 fell on both April Fool’s Day and Easter Monday, I drew on an egg. I drew delicate cracks all over the shell, then placed it back in its box of six. I sent a photo to some friends pretending it had broken in transit. They sent sympathetic replies, which made me feel very devious indeed.
I hard boiled the egg and cracked its shell for real. I felt the tactile striations of the real cracks over the smooth simulated cracks, and ate it. I love that art can be anything you want it to be.
Day 11
Prompt: Post todays work to someone
Josh Philpott, To Cross Any Distance, pencil and biro on cardboard, 1st class letter stamp, 148 x 210 mm, 2024
I work with the limitations of my surroundings, and of myself. My own limitations were more acute before my CF clinic gave me Kaftrio. The headline-making “wonder drug” has elevated the lives of many CF patients. I’m fortunate to include myself among them. But with limits come problems. And from problems come problem solving, and problem solving is creativity. So it makes sense to me to use my limitations.
I’ve developed a practice of making interventions into my given surroundings. I look at architecture around me and find ways of inserting my work. For example:
- a window of a cottage becomes a frame for a drawing;
- gallery invigilators wear t-shirts embroidered with poetry;
- The Royal Mail conveys a drawing of a paper aeroplane to the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA).
Communication as an artist is very important, this is obvious. Art itself is a kind of communication, and artists have to communicate in many directions to get art seen. This has been difficult for me. Illness has enforced prolonged periods of isolation, the longest being the two years of shielding during the COVID-19 pandemic. I hunkered down in my mum’s cottage between 2020 and 2022. I’m very grateful for the shelter my mum could provide, in Somerset. Surrounded by lush fields and stroppy cows, there are worse places to be stuck. But the separation from society outside of my three-person bubble was hard to bear. It necessitated remote contact with many loved ones, and with my studio at Conditions.
I drew the first of my Proposals series of drawings while shielding. I had them printed to show in the Conditions Exhibition 2019-21. I also did my first ever 30works30days while shielding in 2021 (I skipped ‘22). These structures provided solid foundations for me during such an uncertain time. This is what the arrow drawn on the paper plane represents to me, the freedom of communication. The drawing of connections. Whoever at the ICA received this piece, I invite you to post a response!
Day 22
Prompt: What is your art practices superpower?
Josh Philpott, Score for Conjuring Images of Chairs, 2024
Score:
1. Imagine a chair lying upside down in a street.
2. Draw this imagined scene in any medium.
3. Document and send me your drawing via direct message on Instagram @_joshphilpott_
“I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness.”
Alan Moore
If art is magic, then 30works30days is an annual month-long mass ritual conjuring. Through 30works30days I am compelled to expand my boundaries, making many different things in as many situations as possible.
Here’s a question that has been asked to death: What makes an artwork art? I’m more interested in: What makes an artwork art I would make? I’ve already decided that proposals and scores can be artworks. I’m inspired by Turner Prize nominated Ghislain Leung, and Fluxus artist Yoko Ono. Their scores are like spells. They are poetic gestures towards happenings in everyday life. Their power lies in their potential rather than their doing.
For me, curation, too, is artwork. You choose the artists’ pieces, you set them in thematic harmony (or dissonance!) and you build the tone and atmosphere in a space. Curators may also set prompts for artists to respond to. I curated a small group exhibition in 2023 with the prompt “poetic artwork which isn’t poetry”. From this prompt, myself and three artists put together a lovely little show of poetic interventions. Like something conjured from a spell, the pieces together made a greater whole.
To answer the Day 22 prompt, my train of thought looked like this: conjuring, scores, curating. So I wrote a score, doubling as an open call to 30works30days participants. I asked viewers to draw a picture of an upside-down chair in a street and send it to me. There was no promise that I would show any drawings submitted. The results would be up to the viewer’s imagination. Anyone who saw the score would be conjuring chairs in their minds. I did receive four responses though, each so charming and surprising I compiled them into an Instagram post that very night.
Why a chair? One of the first things I had to do in my Sculpture BA was to think of a chair and draw it. I sat on a basic grey plastic stacking chair amongst hundreds of students in a lecture hall. I couldn’t help but imagine all the different chairs everyone drew that day. I decided to put my own spin on it based on an upside-down chair I’d photographed in the street the day before.
Day 29
Prompt: Map how you feel
Josh Philpott, Lost Walk, digital trace on Ordnance Survey App (OSApp), 3.91km walk in Croydon, UK, 2024
This is my favourite work which I made for the 2024 30works30days. Artist Ed Hadfield shared a woodland walk route on Instagram which sparked flashbacks in me. He traced his walk using a Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking feature on the OSApp. He invites us to think of walking in nature as an embodied somatic experience. I thought of public footpaths through fields in Somerset. As I shielded, I had become intimately familiar with these fields. They were a balm, then a kind of claustrophobic entrapment, and then a balm again. I saw them change with the seasons twice over.
Nevertheless, I felt a desire to expand my own practice into psychogeographic walk-tracing territory. This prompt gave me the permission I didn’t realise I’d been waiting for. I literally spelt the word “LOST” with a GPS trace on the OSApp. I mapped out a viable route around local backroads until I conjured the word, then walked it. I found myself in places I hadn’t explored before. It turns out there are many odd items discarded on the pavements: toy house playsets; chest-of-draws in various states of disrepair; upside-down chairs…
The trace is a drawing, a poem, a route. I shared it so that anyone with the OSApp can walk it. I enjoy the contradiction of tracing the word “LOST” on a map and the map tells you exactly where it is. Yet the feeling rang true as I drew it, in an abstract kind of way. “LOST” still kind of hangs around in the background, haunting. Living with cystic fibrosis means constant readjusting. What I’m learning after Kaftrio is that simply living means constant readjusting. It’s thankless, it’s rewarding, it’s gutting, it’s joyous.
30works30days has taken me places I haven’t explored before. It has broadened my set of skills. I’ve since written proposals exhibited in a Lewisham back garden, curated by Coven Collective. I’ve developed a score into a live sound sculpture performed at the ICA. I submitted a proposal to write this article, which is happening right now, as I write this.
I use structure to function. Not as a scaffold to hold my day-to-day needs, but to embody ritual cycles and be generative in my art making, and in my life.
Josh Philpott (b. 1994; Birmingham, UK) stages poetic interventions to be found in public and gallery spaces. An artist working through drawing, text, film, and sound, his situational practice invites contemplation of quiet absurdities in everyday life. He rents a modern terrace in Croydon, living on Universal Credit with cystic fibrosis and CF related diabetes. Recent interventions include Conditions Exhibition 2023-24, Croydon, UK (2024); Light Beams Under A Bridge, screening under a railway bridge over Regent’s Canal, London, UK (2024); Growing Season: Part 1 curated by Coven Collective in a garden in Lewisham (2024); Esoteritech on NTS Live 2 radio (2024); DUMP 01 at Greatorex Street, London, UK (2023). He curated Poems for A Gap In the Door at Conditions Studios Project Space, Croydon, UK (2023). He has been a member of Conditions Studio Programme since 2019.
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