Profile
Josie Beszant is a British mixed-media artist, curator and storyteller based in Masham, North Yorkshire. Working with found objects, paper, textiles, paint and natural materials, she creates assemblages, installations and participatory projects that explore memory, belonging and the quiet significance of ordinary things. Her work is drawn to objects that have been worn, repaired, discarded or overlooked, finding in them evidence of lives lived and stories carried forward. Themes of folklore, ritual, collections and the idea of the reliquary run throughout her practice, alongside an enduring fascination with what we choose to keep and why. Alongside her studio practice, Josie has spent more than thirty years running Masham Gallery, where she champions contemporary British artists and makers and has developed a reputation for creating thoughtful exhibitions rooted in landscape, making and community. This curatorial work informs her own practice, creating conversations between objects, people and place. Increasingly her work extends beyond the gallery wall into shared creative experiences. Drawing on her training as a meditation teacher and her studies in applied storytelling, she creates projects that invite people to slow down, notice more closely and reconnect with landscape, memory and seasonal rhythms through making. Whether creating intimate sculptural assemblages from forgotten fragments or designing participatory works inspired by the changing year, her practice asks how beauty, care and attention can become quiet acts of resistance in a fractured world.