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 rage, fear and doubt. Using a poetic framework, she performs gut feelings difficult to voice or name. The performance uses costume as a historical and mythological anchor to sit inside the moment race or gender foregrounds vulnerability. Speculative scriptwriting and text-to-speech AI locate experience through poetic, non-linear notations, layering sound over performance, a method she developed during her 2022 - 2023, research and development, funded by Arts Council England. 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 understands 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 treats moments of harm as open abrasions, positioning herself as performer, witness, and choreographer. Intersecting politics, care, and sometimes irony, she transforms 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.

My practice refuses containment in a single form. Working across sculpture, painting, performance, film, new technology, and speculative writing, I situate myself at the edges, not the mainstream, the overlooked; I am interested in what resists being named as a site of knowledge.

I work from a Black feminist standpoint, examining how colonial legacies and shifting political climates exert pressure on bodies, places, and psychological landscapes. My method treats gut feelings, rage, fear, doubt, as evidence. These are moments of refusal, difficult to voice or name, that live in the gap of "did I imagine it?" I treat them as open abrasions: unfinished, refusing resolution.

I began working in the wardrobe department of West End productions and in film production, where I developed an understanding of the mechanics of performance from the inside. In 2017 I undertook a research pilgrimage across Senegal, The Gambia, Ghana, Nigeria, Jamaica, Haiti, and New York, retracing landscapes that resonated with my 2016 DNA results. That journey sits inside the work still.

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

2026 - Artist Archive Film Night | Siobhan Davies Studios
2025 - Inaugural Open Cruel, Marianne Keating, Daniella Rose King, Jessica Taylor | Ruby Cruel
2025 - Artworks Open, Keith Piper, Tam Joseph | Barbican Art Group
2023 - Bring Your Light X Chila Burman | Bow Open
2023 - WOCAA: Resonance | 198 Contemporary Arts Gallery
2022 - Traces of the Earth | Lapworth Museum
2018 - Swop Shop | Tate Liverpool, BCU School of Art, Selfridges
2018 - 50 / 50 group | Crows Nest Gallery
2017 - Select artist from public vote | Lovely Gallery
2016 - Sacred Art | Group show
2016 - Group Show | Lovely Gallery
2014 - Group Show | Monty's Bar
2014 - Group Show| Lovely Gallery
2013 - Fragments of Isolated Faculty | Fitzrovia Noir
2012 - I Art. Participatory project | Peckham Shops
2012 - Now Is The Time | Deptford X
2012 - Group show | Peckham Space
2012 - Home Sweet Home | Kijkruimte | Amsterdam
2011 - Group show | Alhambra, Sydenham, SE26

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