Sonic Sermons use speculative writing and text-to-speech AI to locate experience through poetic, non-linear notations. These sound elements come out of the ongoing series Poiesis of Weathering.
The sound from each performance is lifted directly from the videos, allowing the audio to stand independently as a sonic assemblage, while still retaining its connection to the performance.
The videos are filmed in domestic spaces, such as the living room, bedroom, or studio. The background is removed to suspend performance in dream-like space, treating erasure as absence and possibility.
I convert spoken words to audio and edit them with sound effects and music from video-editing libraries to create short musical sermons.
Painting Installation & Performance Archive
Break ∀way State reimagines the video Breakaway State (2020) through a series of paintings based on stills taken from the video footage. The video was commissioned for an online programme of the same name by The Parallel State, and funded by Future's Venture.
The installation traces the impact of migration, colonial legacy, and cultural memory through the embodied language of movement. By drawing on the mathematical universal quantifier '∀' (‘for all’), the work reframes this logical symbol to point towards emotional alignment in the face of state violence by indicating a shared departure from inherited conditions.
These works critique and reveal themes of migration, drawing on the aesthetics and cultural layering of Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust and themes of cultural migration explored in Zora Neale Hurston's writings. Break ∀way State, as an evolving work, functions as archival fragments, connecting motion to memory.
Poiesis of Weathering is a sculptural performance installation supported by an Arts Council research fund. The project is interested in finding new ways to address racism, combining sculpture, performance and sound with a theoretical, speculative narrative through scriptwriting.
The work confronts the complexities of racism by framing experience and shaping artistic practice. The sculptural assemblages are made of ceramic and represent surreal body abstractions. They are attached to the performers’ costumes and become extended layers worn like a second skin..
The sculptural objects also act as standalone pieces. In this view, the body is regarded as a repository of memories, like archaeological strata comprising shared and personal layers through linear and nonlinear narration. The work pays homage to African traditions, namely the Gelede mask, where the performer wears a headdress, often veiling the face. The performance is a provocation to purpose the invisible within the visible, illuminating strength within fragility, juxtaposing care with ferocity. The ceramic sculptures are created in consideration of Kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold. Rather than hide scars, this tradition enhances them, pointing out imperfections and weaknesses, unleashing strength through vulnerability.
Poiesis, as a practice that syncretises thought, spirit, and body, also invites our attention to the lived materials and their historical and personal layering, echoing, in part, the profound insights of abolitionist Quobna Ottobah Cugoano. Using AI text-to-speech to generate disparate characters, accompanied by movements that drive the dramaturgy, the performance is witnessed and choreographed, shaping choreography as an act of refusal. This use of the artificial voice also serves as a means of emotional distancing, allowing the audience to witness states of weathering. Ceramic tea cups and teapots are repurposed to imbue the material with colonialism and enslavement histories. Taking the shape of a nose, reminiscent of the Venetian Naso Peste mask and snake eye emblem, the pieces form the headdress, while the breastplates are attached to the body. Each object, inscribed with a strong colonial bearing, is positioned during the performance to mark a new meaning. The costume, made by stitching together suit jackets, drags the material into a feminine garment to subvert the material's politics alongside its designated gender role. The sleeves and folds in the suit jackets appear mask-like, adding gravitas to the ritual elements of the performance.
Poiesis of Weathering combines different mediums and elements to create a hybrid experience, activating the space with kinetic energy and immersive participation. It fuses ritualistic healing elements with real-life occurrences in an attempt to centre the internal struggles of human nature, highlighting cracks as spiritual, historical composites provocatively assembled in the spirit of Kintsugi.
The performance was presented as part of an ongoing practice-based research process, and was shared with a small invited group of peers and professionals working across performance, academia, and visual art, whose feedback informed subsequent iterations of the work.
Poiesis of Weathering is a deeply resonant work exploring the psychological impact of everyday experiences of racist violence through the use of surrealism, performance and narrative. With a careful regard to the use of materiality and objects, Treasure creates an opening or portal into her own psyche, an internal world that reflects the ongoing and collective horror that is the experience of anti-blackness in the external.
Imani Mason Jordan, Languid Hands
From this process, I developed a series of short performance video sermons, drawing on Beverley Stoute’s theorisation of Black Rage as a reparative strategy that continues to inform my research.
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In conversation with Joyce hosted by Sandra Griffiths from The Red Earth Collective about how race, identity, colonialism, music and mental well being all inform and inspire her work Breakaway State that will be preceded by the short film Breakaway State, a filmed commissioned by the Parallel State in October, 2020.
The Red Earth Collective work with artists and people with lived experience of mental health to create new work that challenges mental health stigma and discrimination in racialised and marginalised communities
WATCH In Conversation with Joyce Treasure
Credits: “Blue Sky And Yellow Sunflower ” written and performed by Susumu Yokota appears courtesy of Lo Recordings. Published by Hub 100 Publishing
In celebration of the Bread and Roses Award and to mark their collaboration with the London Radical Bookfair, they have invited 21 small press artists to respond to the books in year’s shortlist.
Showing eight Artists Selected from The Lovely Gallery Summer Open 2016. Group show opened February 2017
Feb 24th - March 5th 2017
Exploring the theme of BELONGING, #TRIBE15
Following a highly enthusiastic response to a Call for Artists launched in June 2015, Chrom-Art held #TRIBE15 - Alternative Art Festival "Exploring the Current Meaning of Belonging" that brought together works that engaged the artists’ personal views and individual stories on the theme and looked at what belonging in the 21st century means.
The Dulwich Festival is an annual celebration of Art, Music, Theatre, Literature and Walks for all.
Ashburton Hall, Deshi Arts presents....
Art Exhibition by Joyce Treasure
'Our Visual Cortex and the Obscuridad'
14 Feb - 27 Feb 2018
Ashburton Hall
All Welcome, Free entry
Artist: Joyce Treasure is a multidisciplinary artist from South East London, currently studying and living in Birmingham to complete a BA honors degree course in Black Studies.