Josie Overbeck (b.1996) is an artist based in Williamstown, MA. She is pursuing a Bachelor's degree in Studio Art from Williams College after drifting away from other creative fields to commit her life to art. Inspired by personal experiences in love, loss, and death, she seeks to unravel vulnerabilities universal to the human experience. Often navigating periods of mourning and unrest alongside quiet exchanges of intimacy through metaphor and form. While she does not limit her creative practice to one medium or subject, she believes the body has profound knowledge to share, vague and intense places of emotion and intention that words alone often fail to capture. 

Mixed media, fabric, embroidery, wood frame

This work abstracts the female body into tension and containment. Stretching fabric across a rigid frame, the form evokes skin pulled taut—held, constrained, and burdened by what it carries. The embroidered text, “womb a knot in the cradle of my pelvis,” names the body not as softness or fertility, but as strain: a site of binding and pressure.

Motherhood is suggested not through imagery of care, but through force—stretching, holding, enduring. The womb becomes both cradle and knot, a place of origin shaped equally by creation and violence. By removing the figure entirely, the body is reduced to its internal labor, its unseen work. This absence echoes the physical and emotional erasure often embedded within motherhood, where sacrifice is expected and pain rendered invisible.

The translucency of the fabric allows light to pass through while still resisting it, mirroring the contradictions

Charcoal on Paper 

This drawing focuses on hands pulling at skin—an intimate, self-directed gesture that hovers between grounding and compulsion. Fingers pinch, stretch, and press into flesh, treating the body not as an image to be viewed, but as a surface to be tested. Touch becomes a way of locating the self, of confirming presence through sensation.

The repeated, searching lines suggest insistence rather than resolution. The hands do not reach outward; they turn inward, folding back onto the body. This self-contact carries an undercurrent of tension, shaped by vulnerability and endurance. The skin yields, but does not break, holding the marks of pressure and persistence.

Here, intimacy is quiet and unresolved. The act of pulling at the body suggests both care and distress—a need to feel, to anchor, to remain intact. The work considers how touch can function as a language of survival, revealing the body as a site where sensation becomes knowledge.

Graphite on Paper 

This drawing isolates a moment of touch. While the face is carefully rendered, the hands remain indistinct, shifting attention away from the holder and toward the sensation of being touched.

The gesture is intimate yet incomplete. Contact is fully present, but its source is withheld, allowing closeness and distance to exist simultaneously. The hands do not claim the body; they touch without revealing themselves.

By separating touch from visibility, the work considers intimacy as something that can be felt without being fully known. The body receives contact while remaining alone, holding the presence of another through sensation rather than certainty.

Oil on Canvas

In this painting, touch becomes deeply ambiguous. The hands that press into the face could be tender, aggressive, or even erotic—their intention unresolved. Flesh tones are heightened and bruised, suggesting both arousal and injury, while the textured surface records a physical struggle between paint and panel. The figure’s closed eyes imply surrender, but to what remains uncertain: comfort, dominance, or desire. By refusing a single emotional reading, the work underscores how touch can collapse boundaries between care and harm, intimacy and violence, echoing the instability present throughout the exhibition.

Graphite on Paper

This drawing confronts the eroticization of the female nude by reorienting the body toward protection rather than display. Bisected by a kitchen knife, the figure is divided by an object of both utility and threat, situating the body within the domestic sphere—a place of intimacy complicated by power, routine, and outside relationships. One hand shields the chest while the other guards the lower body, asserting self-preservation in the face of exposure. The knife’s presence disrupts traditional readings of the nude, transforming vulnerability into vigilance. Rather than inviting the viewer’s gaze, the figure resists it, holding itself together against intrusion.