Joe Jowitt’s Almost Completely (finished) investigates what happens when we lean into failure, loosen the grip on optimisation, and let mischief steer the making.

Jowitt’s playful and comedic approach to artmaking seeks to interrogate our relationship with technology, language, and materiality. In the face of continual emergency and myriad pressures on environment, culture, and meaning itself, Jowitt asks, can laughter create momentary communities of understanding?

His rudimentary object-making, diagrammatic drawings, and rickety animatronics, render familiar ‘meaning-machines’—such as radios, remotes, signposts— as laconic stand-ins. Through a seesaw of recognition and ambiguity, these objects push the rudimentary approach of a comedy ‘sketch’ into sculptural and drawing processes. In this way he proposes play as a serious philosophical stance: a mode of thinking that scrambles habitual frameworks, embraces erratum, and proposes speculative possibilities for holding things lightly in an unstable troubled world.

Philosophical scaffolding for the project comes from Henri Bergson’s treatise on humour and his ideas around the tension between the mechanical and the vital. Alongside this, Jowitt’s practice draws from a range of thinkers, from Alva Noë’s entanglement of art and life, to Bernard Stiegler’s technics as prosthetic thought, to Donna J. Haraway’s notion of ‘kinning’. Together, they frame humour as a connective force—a way to reorganise ourselves in the ‘thick present’ .

This exhibition marks the completion of Jowitt’s MPhil studies.