Why art matters in 2023: in conversation with Josie Cockram

Josie Cockram is an artist, contemporary art curator and course leader on Falmouth's online master's degree in Fine Art. Trained in sculpture and with a practice grounded in the discipline, she also works with sound, moving image, drawing, photography and installation.

However; it wasn't until her thirties that Josie went to art school. After a decade-long career as a youth worker, she discovered her vocation for artmaking in the pages of a novel.

"While studying literature at Cardiff University, I was writing an essay about the agency of art in George Eliot's Middlemarch. There's a section in the story where Dorothea, the protagonist, has an encounter with a classical Greek sculpture in the Vatican in Rome. That's when I realised that I should be making or writing about art, rather than writing about literature about art", she tells us.

Her life as an artist began in Cornwall when she enrolled at Falmouth on a part-time foundation course, before moving to London to study at Camberwell College of Art and later the Royal Academy of Arts. Now, living on the edge of Dartmoor, she has returned to lead Falmouth's online master's degree in Fine Art. "I'm interested in how we make connections between major cities - cultural centres for contemporary art - and other locations in the UK and across the world; how we can sustain lives as artists, but also how we engage people across all our communities."

Whether it's climate change or social change, it is important to think about how we live in a globalised culture - how we acknowledge difference while seeking points of connection

A south-westerner born and bred, after many years in London Josie was drawn back down south; a residency at Plymouth Arts Centre was followed by an exciting opportunity to work on Groundwork, a three-year programme of exhibitions and events presenting acclaimed international art works across Cornwall. As Josie reflects, "I was drawn to the project because of the ambition of its director Teresa Gleadowe. I wanted to spend time thinking about how to make art happen in a rural situation - to tune into and enliven connections between the local and the international."

The capacity for art to help us think about how we live in conversation with each other, and with our environment, is more pressing than ever in current times. "Whether it's climate change or social change, it is important to think about how we live in a globalised culture - how we acknowledge difference while seeking points of connection", Josie tells us.