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Joyce Treasure is a multidisciplinary artist ~ she gained her BA (1st) Honours in Black Studies from Birmingham City University. Originally trained as a silversmith, she has extensive experience working within the creative industry, including prop making and photography. She received a certificate in scriptwriting from Birkbeck university in 1988, which led to her winning a writing award where her film was made and funded by BBC and ABI. She taught film production, working also as an editor and director. In 2012, she began to practice as a multidisciplinary artist working in layers and body forms to slice cultural and iconic imagery together using collage, print, acrylic, assemblage and film around the topic of identity. She employs notions of 'the carnivalesque', Black feminism and decolonial thought to question colonialism, which seeks to examine ideas of dominance and power.
She draws on her mixed heritage and lived experiences to explore feelings of loss, absence, omission, presence, memory, recovery, and exchange. Treating this knowledge as resourceful material to experiment between the personal and the social, Joyce is interested in the tension that can arise through this research and how it correlates within the social structures of power and knowledge.
Joyce began a four-month travel research trip in 2017, visiting Jamaica, Haiti, New York, Senegal, Gambia, Ghana, and Nigeria, which has greatly influenced her practice.
Her current work explores the masquerade, characterised by masks, dances, and chants. She is interested in the Gelede performed by the Yoruba-Nago community, which pays homage to women - especially older women. She is interested in the intergenerational transmission of trauma as a site for healing and well-being. This study seeks to examine colonial histories, resistance and survival to analyse parallels between different sites and locations.
Screening and exhibitions include ICA, Portobello Film Festival, Himalaya Palace, The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, Kijkruimte, Bishopsgate institution, Tate Liverpool, Selfridges, Eastside Projects, Stryx Gallery, and Grand Union. One of five winners of BBC Bollywood Shorts, funded by BFI and BBC and residencies with Kijkruimte Gallery, Netherland, Grand Union and Bruntwood, Birmingham.