Supporting independent artists like Jo Howell has a tangible impact — it gives her the freedom to create art without compromise, while providing vital security as she lives with chronic illness.
Intuition and Creative Pull
Art as Compulsion, Survival, and Conversation
I’m Jo Howell, a photographic artist from the North East of England. Although my work now centres predominantly around the cyanotype process, my wider practice spans printmaking, painting, photography, textiles, and mixed media experimentation. I create work politically, emotionally, and instinctively. My art is about women, labour, illness, memory, class, science, and survival.
I also live with Fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition that affects nearly every aspect of my life. It is unpredictable, exhausting, and constantly evolving. Some days it strips away my ability to move, think clearly, or even speak properly. Yet despite all of that, creativity remains the one thing illness has never fully taken from me.
Recently, I completed a series of ten self-reflective cyanotype essays written mostly during my commute to and from work. They explored my philosophy around cyanotype, my relationship with process, and the ways creativity intersects with disability and lived experience. After finishing the original run of essays, I asked my followers on Facebook what I should write about next.
One fellow cyanotype artist asked me a deceptively simple question:
How do you decide what you want to work on?
The truth is, I don’t think I’ve ever had a neat answer.
If you’ve followed my work for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed that my portfolio appears fairly chaotic at first glance. I move between techniques, subjects, and materials constantly. I’m the artist who often has no clear plan until something falls out of my head and into my hands. But over time, I’ve realised there is a logic underneath it all. My process is not random. It is intuitive.
The Instinct to Make
The first thing to understand about me is that I have what I call “itchy fingers.” I make things compulsively. Creativity is not a hobby or an occasional pastime; it is a physical and emotional necessity. There has to be some kind of tactile process involved in what I do. I need to touch materials, stain surfaces, sew into cloth, coat paper, expose prints to sunlight, wash chemicals away, and physically transform objects with my hands.
The second major influence on my work is money — or more accurately, the lack of it. I am working class. I do not have access to expensive materials, huge studios, or unlimited resources. That reality has shaped my practice as much as any artistic philosophy ever could. I cannot afford wastefulness, but equally I do not believe in it ethically either. I repurpose materials constantly. Failed works are rarely thrown away. Old experiments become foundations for new ideas.
The third influence is disability. Everything I make has to exist within my physical capabilities. If I work large scale, I have to do it from a tabletop because my body cannot sustain prolonged physical strain. Fatigue and pain dictate what is possible each day. My illness is not a side note to my practice; it is woven deeply into the structure of it.
As the years have passed and my condition has worsened without prolonged periods of relief, illness has naturally begun to loom larger in the work itself. This has become an act of reclamation. Fibromyalgia may take huge pieces of my life, but it cannot entirely erase my creative voice.
Of course, there are periods where it silences me temporarily. During severe flares I can become trapped in exhaustion and pain, unable to move properly or form coherent thoughts. It can be frightening in ways that are difficult to explain unless you have experienced chronic illness yourself. The guilt and anxiety that come with inactivity can be as heavy as the physical symptoms. But I always return eventually. And when I return, I make something.
That certainty matters.
Following Emotional and Visual Threads
The starting point for most of my work is not a rigid concept or strategic plan. Instead, it is usually a visual, emotional, or conceptual pull toward something. A texture. A historical story. A scientific idea. A feeling. A memory. A conversation.
Again and again, I find myself returning to recurring themes:
- Chronic illness
- Women’s histories
- Northern working-class identity
- Nature and environmental textures
- Science and medicine
- The body and vulnerability
Even when I apply for commissions or artist opportunities, I instinctively search for briefs that can bend toward these interests.
Commissioned work creates an interesting tension because there is always another voice involved. A commissioner arrives with expectations and ideas of their own, and often the image they hold in their mind differs entirely from the one forming in mine. My role then becomes finding a middle ground that preserves creative integrity without dismissing the needs of the client.
That contrast highlights the difference between personal work and commissioned work. Personal work is deeply internal and instinctive. Commissioned work requires negotiation.
The Role of Cyanotype Process
These days, cyanotype dominates much of my practice. There are practical reasons for this. Cyanotype chemicals are inexpensive, accessible, and remarkably versatile. All I really need is chemistry, a surface, sunlight, water, and time.
But there are emotional reasons too.
Cyanotype feels alive to me. It responds to weather, season, light levels, and environment. It changes depending on how I physically interact with it. The process mirrors the cycles of nature itself.
In summer, I want to work outdoors, coating huge surfaces in sunlight while absorbing whatever precious vitamin D my body can gather. In winter, I shift toward fabrics and stitching, working indoors through dark evenings with cloth in my lap. Spring encourages collecting flowers and leaves for contact prints. Autumn draws me toward seed heads and skeletal plant remains.
The seasons change the work because they change me.
I think this cyclical relationship is part of why I remain so attached to cyanotype after all these years. Photography can often become obsessed with precision, perfection, and technical complexity. Cyanotype rejects much of that. It creates impressions rather than exact replicas. It is imperfect, unpredictable, and tactile.
Many photographers dismiss it because of that simplicity. Yet simplicity is precisely what attracts me to it. There is honesty in cyanotype. It is democratic. Accessible. Primitive in the best possible sense.
I still approach it experimentally after all this time. I still ask childish questions every day:
Can I print on this?
Will this survive the wash?
What happens if I layer this differently?
Can I stitch into it afterwards?
New ideas emerge through repetition and physical engagement. The process itself generates intuition.
Patterns, Memory, and Meaning
One of the strange things about being an artist is that your themes often reveal themselves long before you consciously recognise them. For years I believed I was scattered and inconsistent because my projects appeared so varied. But eventually patterns emerged.
I realised I had been revisiting the same emotional territory repeatedly.
Much of my recent work centres on chronic illness and the body. In one ongoing series, I use empty medication blister packs and pill boxes as grounds for self-portraits. The work is intentionally repetitive. I plan to continue printing from damaged acetate negatives until they physically degrade beyond usability. The deterioration of the image becomes inseparable from the deterioration of the body.
Before turning myself into the subject matter, I frequently focused on forgotten histories of women from the North East of England. I used art to pull their stories out from beneath the shadows of industrial male narratives. Those histories still matter deeply to me.
The coastline and environment around my home also continue to surface throughout the work. Beachcombing, collecting textures, gathering plants — these activities become part of the rhythm of making. Some days my health allows me to wander outdoors gathering materials. Other days I remain indoors sewing quietly while resting. Cyanotype accommodates both realities beautifully because it allows flexibility rather than rigid structure.
Disability, Poverty, and Creative Space
There are two enormous external pressures that shape my artistic life more than anything else: disability and money.
I am a middle-aged, working-class woman from the North East of England. Those facts influence how the art world sees me whether I want them to or not. Opportunities within the creative industries often favour people with financial stability, social access, institutional support, and physical stamina. I possess very little of those things.
What I do have is persistence.
Over the years I have consciously leaned into the things that make me “unsuitable” for parts of the contemporary art world. I combine craft with photography. I make things by hand. I embrace process. I work slowly. I create around illness rather than pretending it does not exist.
As my physical health has declined, I have also found traditional public-facing commissions and participation work increasingly difficult. Workshops, installations, and community projects require energy reserves that I do not always possess anymore.
That reality partly pushed me toward filmmaking and online content creation. I was already documenting my process through photography and video, so it made sense to begin sharing that work publicly online.
The internet can be chaotic and exhausting, particularly in an era increasingly dominated by AI-generated content and algorithms. But oddly enough, it also levels certain playing fields. Online, my rough North Eastern accent and unconventional communication style matter less. In fact, authenticity has become one of my strengths. I am visibly human in a digital environment becoming increasingly artificial.
Building a Sustainable Creative Future
I genuinely believe that online creative work may be the most sustainable future available to me now. It allows flexibility around illness in ways that traditional employment and gallery systems often do not. I can work when my body allows. I can rest when I need to. I can continue creating without waiting for institutional permission.
That flexibility matters enormously when living with chronic illness.
My larger artworks are available internationally through online gallery platforms, while local exhibitions remain something I participate in more for connection and enjoyment than financial necessity. The digital space has become central to how I survive creatively.
Because of this, support through platforms like Patreon and YouTube memberships genuinely makes a difference to independent disabled artists like myself. These forms of direct support allow me to continue writing, filming, experimenting, and producing work despite the instability that illness creates.
If you enjoy my essays, cyanotype experiments, films, or reflections on art and chronic illness, supporting my work through Patreon or becoming a YouTube member helps sustain both the creative practice and the person behind it. Independent artists increasingly survive through communities of people who believe in what they do.
Mistakes, Failure, and Serendipity
I do not fear failure creatively. Mistakes are part of the process.
That philosophy probably comes partly from necessity. When you cannot afford to waste materials, failed work becomes raw material for future work. Nothing is truly discarded. Pieces sit unfinished for months or years until eventually they reveal what they were meant to become.
Some of my favourite artworks began as failures.
I remember one workshop participant becoming frustrated because she had applied too much cyanotype solution to her paper. Rather than throwing it away, she pressed her hands into the excess chemistry repeatedly, creating layered handprints across the surface before printing flowers within them. The result was extraordinary — accidental, instinctive, and beautiful.
That moment stayed with me because it perfectly captured what I value in creativity: openness, adaptation, and conversation with process.
Artworks speak back if you allow them enough time.
Sometimes unfinished pieces need years before they reveal their purpose. Sometimes they never do. But occasionally they evolve alongside you, growing and changing as your own life changes too.
Who is to say anything is ever truly finished anyway?
Final Thoughts
At its core, my creative process is not really about deciding what to make. It is about paying attention. Paying attention to instinct, to illness, to environment, to memory, to materials, and to the emotional threads that continue resurfacing over time.
Art for me is not separate from life. It is how I process life.
Even in periods where illness strips everything else away, creativity remains. Sometimes quietly. Sometimes messily. Sometimes unfinished. But always there, waiting.
And perhaps that is the real answer to the original question.
I do not always know what I want to work on.
I simply keep making things until the work tells me.
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