Joshua BILTON

16 mm, projection (looped) 2023

Duration 04:23

67 Laments is made in collaboration with the bird ringer and conservationist Brendan Shields during my residency at Hogchester Arts in West Dorset. At the time of filming, 67 birds were listed as endangered on the red list, in contrast to 36 listed in 1995 in the first report. Filming Brendan’s hands closely, the work documents a moment of prolonged contact between the human hand and different bird species during the ringing process. The piece reflects on the repeated movement of opening and closing the hand. As birds appear and disappear, the work offers space to consider the role the human hand plays in protecting, repairing, damaging and destroying what is close to it.

When editing I kept coming back to the loop, to this looping action of Brendan holding and letting go of the bird at the end of the ringing process.

When it loops and the bird appears again I’m reminded of magic shows where the magician makes something disappear and then reappear. After seeing many magic shows when I was young, I learnt to trust the magician to always bring that thing back. As I got older I learnt that some things disappear and don’t reappear, they go and stay gone.

1 minute showreel of 67 Laments, My Father’s Body & 84 Gestures of Care.

Objects for meditation to be held in the palm of the hand.

Clay objects and found stones from eroding coastlines, wrapped in thread, dimensions variable, 2020

I started collecting these stones on a series of walks around the UK coastline during my residency at the Wellcome Collection. I brought them to workshops and used them as a means of conversation and meditation on loss, grief and healing. Using multiple threads of cotton on a central spool, participants explored the process of encasing, covering and veiling the stones.

As a continued research interested, the act of veiling e.g the covering of the face when we cry, closing of the eyes or lowering or turning away of the head, confront the difficulty in expressing loss. I am particularly interested in the history of veiling in ancient Greek culture and how this practice illustrates that the gesture of covering is an expression or symbol of loss in itself e.g the abstract language of loss relies on an object to hold the void.

Stones collected from coastal walks at Beachy Head, East Sussex; Charmouth along the Jurassic Coast, Dorset; Happisburgh, Norfolk; Easton Bavents, Norfolk; West Runton, Norfolk; Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex; Hunstanton, Norfolk; Fairlight Glen, East Sussex; St Agnes, north coast of Cornwall.

16 mm, projection (looped)

Duration 02:21

I came across two poems by W.S. Merwin after reading about his lifetime efforts to grow and preserve a rare Hawaiian palm forest. In The Rain At Night there is this sense of trying to get your head around expansive, slow and non human time, such as the growth of trees and how quick it is to chop one down. In Waking To The Rain there is an awareness of close human time such as the ageing or collapse of his father's body and the sound of falling rain.

Both poems made me think about my own father and how his body had changed, I was suddenly aware that his body had aged. Within a woodland close to our house, I wanted to make a piece about touch, contact, slow and sudden time.

Digital projection / monitor

Duration 01:20 looped.

Performed in my bedroom 7th April 2020.

I played Neil Young’s album After The Gold Rush on vinyl and tried to return the needle to the same part of the song. It’s a song about time travel, with a strong environmental message, that my parents played a lot when I was a young. The sounds would fill the car on trips and play dampened through the kitchen ceiling into my bedroom. In the studio I was interested in trying to return the melody to the same part of the song as a method of time travel and how this distorted, skipped and broke-down the more I tried. Playing the sound back in my bedroom during the first lockdown it had a strong melancholy and nostalgia to it and that’s when I filmed my body on my phone, moving and looping to the sound.

Choreography and movement by Daisy May Kemp

2 screen digital projection

Duration 02:20 looped

67 Laments uses hand gestures to cast and enclose emptiness. The movements reflect and pause on 67 birds currently on the extinction list.

Clay cast of two hands touching. Fibre-based warmtone hand print. 339 x 290mm framed.

Text extract from Rodrigo Orrantia’s essay On Touch (or the impossibility of touch)

The clay cast in the image is a direct reproduction of two hands; the creases and folds on the material are evidence of their contact. But then the photograph of this unusual object – a second layer of representation – frees it from its original reference, and for me its message becomes the absence of the hands and the fleetingness of their contact.

I read it as an image of an absence, an attempt to preserve an instant that is no more. Both the cast and the photograph capture a void, but it is certainly the latter that makes it evident. Bilton elaborates this thought by talking about his work and notions of loss. “It is a continuation into processing concepts of loss, emptiness, mutability and endings. I am particularly interested in my own inability to fully understand endings and I seem to reflect backwards and forwards in time to things I’ve lost and fear losing. These photographs that encompass walking, impressions and casting both in the form of light and clay are a witness to the material traces of the bodies closest and furthest from me.”

Thinking about touch -especially in the context of the current situation- this work reminds me of an abstract type of absence, perhaps not actually of physical touch, but of an emotional contact with another person.

Bilton’s image also prompts me to think about the futility of our attempts to hold on to memories, recreating them in the hope of extending or reliving associated emotions. This discussion inevitably points back to photography and its connection to memory. But it is the intermediacy of the clay object that disrupts an otherwise conventional reference, creating a more obscure take on the subject. The way the cast is lit, and how it stands on a pedestal against a dark background make it seem like a monument of sorts. It is also the monochrome image that imbues it with a type of solemnity.

Wellcome Collection, Sunday 26th January 2020, 12:30 - 13:30

Join artist Joshua Bilton for a performance lecture on his research exploring the role of the spirit double and how it can be used as a form of processing loss, grief, uncertainty and emptiness. The immersive experience will include birdsongs performed as laments by cellist and composer Gregor Riddell and movement as lament by Sim Gray and Frieda Luk. You will also be invited to take part in a meditation on weight and make an offering that will form part of the artwork.

Part of No End and No Beginning curated by Persilia Caton

Experience a day of performances, discussions, screenings and workshops related to ‘Misbehaving Bodies’ on the closing day of this exhibition. Throughout its duration, artists have been responding to the exhibition and here they will present their research and projects. These events are focused on themes of care, loss, mourning, death, illness and dying – each highly personal yet universal experiences that continually change, with no clear end or beginning.

Thanks to Lorena Sanchez-Nelson for your amazing textile work on the disc and to Paula Barnard-Groves for making the large metal disc.

Photographs by Wellcome Collection, Video documentation by Janneke Van Leeuwen.

67 Laments

67 laments developed out of a research residency at the Wellcome Collection and a three day workshop at Tate Exchange, both of which created a space to reflect through material processes on care, loss, mourning, death, illness and dying.

67 laments explores ways of relating to the human and nonhuman through touch.  The works are concerned with absence in their effort to find ways of remembering, reliving, sustaining and returning to a point of touch and empathy with our body and in turn the bodies of others.  They portray acts of holding on, prolonging, casting and looping as photographic, filmic and sonic methods of reflecting on beginnings and endings.

Running throughout the pieces is a preoccupation with lament, what we are lamenting for and how this can be carried through gesture and held in bird forms.  During the last year I’ve been interested in how birds have been used to process loss, crisis and grief in their nature as both creatures of the earth and the sky.  In poetry, literature and mythology they are often seen as spiritual animals directly connected to the threshold state between living, dying, beginning and ending.  

Wellcome Collection, part of Misbehaving Bodies Drop-in Workshops.

Saturday 21 September 2019 12:00—17:00

This creative workshop explores the idea of a ‘Spirit Double’ and how it can enable someone to process grief and healing. Artist Josh Bilton will lead you through the discussion and the creation of a collective offering, including writing, ink-blot printing onto fabric, and plaiting.

Photographs by Wellcome Collection

Nightingale, Cuckoo, Turtle Dove, Skylark, Mistlethrush, Willow-Tit.

Original recordings by E.M Nicholson and Ludwig Koch.

Offering

Fri April 26 - Sun April 28, 12 - 17:00 as part of Age/ncy, a three day programme at Tate Exchange. I was invited by Flourishing Lives and ACAVA to devise and facilitate a three day workshop within the Tate Exchange programme with residents from North Kensington.

The 3 day workshop takes inspiration from a few lines of a poem by Alis Oswald titled Tithonus.

“very nearly anonymous now / having recently turned five thousand with the same wedge of / yearning lodged in my chest as ever”

The poem is envisaged as a performance and begins in total darkness.  A figure sits alone in a room, he has been granted immortality but forgets to ask for his body not to grow old.  5000 years old now, decaying and alone he sits waiting for dawn who he has fallen in love with.  As she gradually arrives and the room fills with light his body is exposed in a state of decay and collapse.  The poem is about dying, mourning, nostalgia, love and loss and light.  It is also about memory, the things that we remember and perhaps forget that are deeply buried in our body.

My research began with this poem and when my mum believed that my grandmother’s soul had passed into a rose quartz stone that she held in her hand when she was dying.

Using this as a beginning I ran a 3-day workshop at Tate Exchange asking people to make an offering and to share their responses to threshold objects, Spirit Doubles and rituals that allowed them to process of remember a state locked in the body.

The workshop took ritual (an act repeated) as a form of remembering, locating or simply meditating. Participants would sit down, make a plait from orange twine and print or write their memory, longing or story onto a fabric square.  I then offered them the option to take this away or to leave it in the space.  If they chose to leave it, the piece was then wrapped, sealed and knotted to a thread of offerings that expanded over the three days.  It was quite an intense three days, I didn't realise how emotional this experience would be for some people, one lady broke down into tears and there was a general feeling of letting go or offering up from both young and old. The workshop made me consider developing further this idea of a space for collective ritual where participants could process something alone but amongst others who were carrying out the same action. This research was continued at the Wellcome Collection as part of a research residency.

Part of: Ageism is getting old: marking 50 years of the anti-ageism movement at Tate Modern curated by Flourishing Lives.

A collective meditation on weight as part of the performance lecture Wavering Between the Sun, the Bird and the Lament. Movement exercise taken and adapted from The Invisible Actor by Yoshi Oida and Lorna Marshall, p16-17.

Draft notes 5th August 2020

I’ve been looking over the last few years at this list of endangered birds. Currently there are 67 of them in the UK and I’ve been heading into the woods and trying out 67 laments or forms of empathy for each bird. The latest is a video that shows my hand opening and closing 67 times and photographs of my body paused as part bird part human. I’m still following along the lines of how birds have been used mythologically and spiritually to confront human difficulties with threshold spaces of death and endings. But also what does a choreography of empathy with another species look like, it is not enough to mimic the manner or movements of another species, this does not bring me closer to understanding my relationship with the non-human world so what am I looking for? I think it’s a movement that attempts to understand a human desire to relate and connect more deeply to things and perhaps the difficulty in doing so.

Draft notes 5th August 2020

I’ve been looking over the last few years at this list of endangered birds. Currently there are 67 of them in the UK and I’ve been heading into the woods and trying out 67 laments or forms of empathy for each bird. The latest is a video that shows my hand opening and closing 67 times and photographs of my body paused as part bird part human. I’m still following along the lines of how birds have been used mythologically and spiritually to confront human difficulties with threshold spaces of death and endings. But also what does a choreography of empathy with another species look like, it is not enough to mimic the manner or movements of another species, this does not bring me closer to understanding my relationship with the non-human world so what am I looking for? I think it’s a movement that attempts to understand a human desire to relate and connect more deeply to things and perhaps the difficulty in doing so.