James Southall-Ford (born 1999, England), is an artist and researcher based in London. 

They are primarily occupied with emphasizing a certain interrelationship of matter, economy, and time, with their research delving into mass movements of labour, the moral and material implications of drone warfare, and the recalibrating of our contemporary landscape by the logistical modes of globalisation.

Throughout their work is a focus on digital technology, mass archiving and industrial manufacturing, coming together within a desire to dispel the discursive separation of consumption and its offshore violence. Currently, they are occupied with investigating the immaterial potentials of concrete materialities; the energies imposed and extracted through industrial practices and logistical discourses are evoked through the arranging of multiple materials and objects. What is at play here is a dismissing of myth, a rejection of facades, in a mass recognition of capitalism’s grasp over our own agency, and that of nature itself. Despite such a realization, what we can truly do to act against such an overwhelming system of governance and function is left unknown; instead, temporally obscure fragmentations and forms, both specific and universal, are left to point towards what we have chosen to disguise all along.

Their material choices point towards a contemplation of manufacturing, extraction, swamp environments, and their topographical interrelations; combining the industrial with unpredictable processes, found detritus with high levels of fabrication, material hierarchies emerge whilst a sensitivity towards processes of displaying objects refers to the categorisation of knowledge in the contemporary sphere. They exhibit widely with recent projects dealing with logistical infrastructures and the anthropocentric legacies of land art and minimalism. Much of their work reaches a point of collapse, disrupting capitalist logics of existence - they seek new socio-political ground through heightened material states. 

They are currently working towards theorising drowning as a material process fit to resist the capitalist reality of life.