SELECTS05
Joshua Beaty 
Multi-disciplinary
artist and designer
There’s a warped world of nightmarish discord, conflict, frustration, disgust, disappointment and quite a lot of joy in Joshua Beaty’s art. He is a maker, an accomplished knitter and crocheter; a surrealist, a humourist, a hoarder of found objects, a joker, a doomster, a collagist and a merging of the dark underbellies of the worlds of fashion and art. He sees humour in phalluses, joke shop poo, tits, old tights and icky bits of hair that find their way into much of his work.

He gives his work titles like Happiness is Baby Onions Wrapped in Cream Sauce, the name of a display recently shown as part of the annual group show at the Sarabande Foundation in Haggerston, where he has had a studio crammed with a shifting tide of objects he has found on his walks and discarded by his neighbours, for the past two years.

‘I have a childish affinity wth dirt,’ he wrote as a way of not explaining the series of creatures and assemblages on display, like the seated T-shirt sculpture with odd eyes made from one tennis ball, one onion, the teat from a baby’s bottle protruding from its head like a boil, a knitted scarf with the ends left hanging, draped above a pair of tights filled with odd sized balls sagging around the hem of the T-shirt. ‘I was thinking about the history of fashion and hundreds of years ago clothes formed part of the inheritance of the aristocracy, fashion changed so slowly and I wanted to treat all of these really throwaway things as they were the most precious heirlooms,’ he told me. But he would neither agree nor disagree with anything anyone has to say about his installations. What you take from it is yours.

I looked in on his studio recently and asked him what he was doing. ‘Thinking,’ he said. ‘I have periods of intense activity and then depression afterwards. It’s been a strange year, seems like a good time to reflect.’

Between making his own work, he teaches fashion students at Central Saint Martins, which has meant a lot of time spent on Zoom. ‘I just always want them to question everything. For me the journey is always the most exciting thing. That’s why the work I make at the moment is so temporary, because we already have so much we don’t need any more things. And if we do, we should be selective about what it is.’
The pandemic has, he says, ‘made me even more certain of what I already thought… We need to reflect on what we need, why we need it, what is important.’

He works instinctively, with ‘total abandon. The way I see the world, it’s not perfect and it’s not always a nice place to be. You have to react and adapt and fit yourself in somewhere.’ TB

Joshua Beaty’s bandits will be in the windows of House of Bandits, the Sarabande Takeover at Thomas’s Café,
5 Vigo Street, W1, opening 7 October; sarabandefoundation.org
WORDS TAMSIN BLANCHARD | PHOTOGRAPH EDD HORDER