Biography

Joyce Treasure (b. 1965, Birmingham, UK) lives in London. She graduated with a BA Hons, First Class degree, in Black Studies from Birmingham City University in 2020. Joyce is a multidisciplinary artist and independent researcher whose practice includes performance, painting, video, costume, writing, and installation.

Her recent study, Poiesis of Weathering, focuses on how her method, cartography of harm, developed through documenting erasure, can operate as an adaptive strategy to work with discomfort and the weight of historical layering and ancestral resonance. Cartographies of Harm are performances for camera, unpacking experiences around micro-aggressions. Using a poetic framework, she performs gut feelings difficult to voice or name. The performance uses costume as a historical and mythological anchor to reframe experience, leaning into harm as a way to challenge the political. Speculative scriptwriting and text-to-speech AI locate experience through poetic, non-linear notations, layering sound over performance. The visuals are stripped back, often monochrome, and performed in domestic spaces: her living room, bedroom, or studio. Maintaining control in the editing process, she removes the background to suspend performance in dream-like space, treating erasure as absence and possibility.

Her practice examines how changing climates and colonial legacies impact bodies, places, and the psychological landscape from a Black feminist standpoint. She regards the body as a repository of memories, like archaeological strata, comprising shared and personal layers that unfold through linear and nonlinear stories. Drawing on mythology and rituals of refusal, she translates these narratives, treating moments of harm as open abrasions, positioning herself as performer, witness, and choreographer. Intersecting politics, care, and satire, she translates objects and images into allegories of lived experience, working across a wide range of mediums, including sculpture, painting, performance, film, new technology, and writing.

Acquisitions of work include Bruntwood, Birmingham, and Winchester University, and she was awarded an arts residency at Grand Union and Bruntwood, where she sat on the board as a trustee, 2021–2025. Residencies include working with the Lapworth Museum and Black Art Forum in 2021 and 2022. Following the launch of Stryx VR gallery space, Joyce was awarded a SPOT VR Residency in January 2022. In addition to being an awardee of the Womxn of Colour Art Award, 2022, from 198 Contemporary Arts Gallery, she has been working 1-2-1 and with groups exploring personal archives and shared social histories, delivering workshops as part of her current research.

CV: Click here - recent projects, research, exhibitions, and collaborations.

Shows and Residencies

Past Solo Shows

2019 - Solo show | Cornerblock Building
2018 - Solo show | Ashburton Hall, Croydon
2014 - Solo show | Calabash of Culture

Past Group Shows

Residencies

Art Festivals

Street Art

2016 - Dulwich Outdoor Gallery | Street Art
2015 - Turnpike Art Group | In The Frame
2013 - Street Art Festival | Sydenham Art Festival

Film

Studio

Based in London, UK