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Joyce Treasure

@joycetreasure

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Painter. Performer. Witness.
Autobiographical paintings for women who love and rage.

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SYN4SYS: Sankofa

Acrylic, copper leaf and oil on canvas 90 × 60 × 2 cm 2026

Originating from a photograph taken by my daughter on my birthday, 2022, during a wine-tasting trip in Sussex, alongside performance characters captured during my Stryx: SPOT VR residency in 2022. The SPOT performance paid homage to Gelede, a Yoruba tradition honouring the spiritual and social power of women, particularly the vital role of mothers and the feminine principle in maintaining balance within the community. Through masquerade, dance, music and satire, Gelede celebrates and acknowledges the power of women and the complex forces shaping collective life.

Returning to copper, a metal I have a long-standing relationship with through my past jewellery practice, introduces another layer to this painting. Laid over black acrylic, the copper leaf brings its own material histories into relation with Blackness, rupture and the conditions through which acceptance is negotiated.

Adopting my dear Aunt Elsie’s methodology, “f@ck em”: acknowledging the rage, rupture, bitterness and all the messy feelings it takes to shake off the layers of limitation imposed by this violent colonial project. by @joycetreasure

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9 days ago

It’s been just over two weeks since my return from Jamaica. A short look back over our time on this stunning and beautiful island I call home from home 🌴❤️🌴

1. Two of my favourite people right here. You did well Mr Treasure and we are eternally grateful. Amen and amen.  
2. Fulljoy in Runaway Bay Jamaican Tai Chi brought to you by brother Washington and sister Joyce 🧿 
3. Here in spirit if not in body. A small cairn paying homage to my dear dad, located in Blue Mountain next to a small waterfall near Japan. We wanted to be nearer to where I scattered my dad’s ashes, but due to Hurricane Melissa, we were unable to get to that side of the mountain. It was a feat in itself reaching this side, where part of the road has fallen completely away and the local people - LOCAL PEOPLE - have dug a new road into the side of the mountain to keep the main B1 routes leading up from Kingston accessible.

4. 🌴

5. Lush Rain Forest, darling Freya @freyabt, Port Antonio

6. Family and

7. Family

8. Rio Grande River

9. Hanging lobster-claw (Heliconia rostrata)

10. Blue Lagoon. Local people have been without access to their rafts for the last 3 years, following the closure and suspension of commercial activities. Meanwhile, million-pound houses and private developments have sprung up around this extraordinary public natural resource. It raises an uncomfortable question about who Jamaica’s beauty is really being preserved for: the local people whose livelihoods depend on it, or a wealthier class increasingly able to privatise access to Jamaica’s paradise.

11. Thank you cuz xx So much love and respect for all the lifetime hard work you’ve put into building your home ❤️ Mandeville treated us well.

12. Blue Hole Mineral Spring. It’s an absolutely stunning spot… not quite captured the incredible colours, but look at those two beauties bobbing and being botanical mineralated. Go and experience Wabba’s herbal ceremonies. You can thank me later 😎🥰

13. Fresh akee - Britains new delicacy  
Just a snippet. I could go on forever as we managed to catch so many beautiful shots of our time in Jamaica. But for now. by @joycetreasure

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10 days ago

Sonic Sermons: Performing Archives with @_kim.chin @genovese.nicola @abiagius @toyosi.___ and @hannah.jose  
A Horizontal Practices workshop as part of the London Performance Studios programme.

Thank you to everyone for giving up control like a crochet doll, and for sharing your archives, memories of archives, stories and movement to activate the space. 🖤 And thank you to @londonperformancestudios for the invitation to deliver the workshop. by @joycetreasure

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16 days ago

Join us on 1 October for Sonic Sermons: Performing Archives, a Horizontal Practices workshop led by multidisciplinary artist and researcher Joyce Treasure.

Sonic Sermons: Performing Archives
→ Thu 1 Oct / 10 AM - 4 PM
→ More info and tickets via link in bio

Joyce Treasure @joycetreasure is a multidisciplinary artist and independent researcher, whose practice includes performance, painting, video, photography, costume, writing, and installation.

Joyce Treasure’s practice draws primarily from Black feminist thought, particularly Beverley Stoute’s theorisation of Black Rage, alongside an ongoing interest in Yoruba cosmology and Butoh. Her work proposes refusal as a reparative process, addressing impermanence, ancestral knowledge, and the generative potential of fragments.

In many creative and collaborative spaces, there is an emphasis on joy as a condition of feminist resistance and survival. Her research sits in tension with this: she is interested in what gets foreclosed when joy becomes a requirement and grief, rage, and ambivalence are treated as problems to move through rather than as valid, generative modes in their own right.

Horizontal Practices is a strand of LPS programming dedicated to peer-to-peer learning and non-hierarchical spaces for conversation. These take form as discursive events, professional training, and curated guest workshops.

#HorizontalPractices by @joycetreasure

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a month ago

@london_performance_studios Sonic Sermons: Performing Archives
a Horizontal Practices workshop led by multidisciplinary artist and researcher Joyce Treasure

Sonic Sermons: Performing Archives is a day-long workshop led by Joyce Treasure that offers participants space to explore personal archives as material for assemblage-making and embodied performance.

Through speculative writing, body mapping, and the creation of sculptural assemblage pieces, the session is designed to grow towards a collective participatory performance in which assembled objects become active presences.

The workshop is aimed at artists, activists and community builders interested in decolonial practices and feminist perspectives. Participants from all backgrounds and practices are welcome, and no previous experience is expected or required.

Sonic Sermons: Performing Archives
→ Thu 1 Oct / 10 AM - 4 PM
→ More info and tickets via link in bio

Joyce Treasure’s practice draws primarily from Black feminist thought, particularly Beverley Stoute’s theorisation of Black Rage, alongside an ongoing interest in Yoruba cosmology and Butoh. Her work proposes refusal as a reparative process, addressing impermanence, ancestral knowledge and the generative potential of fragments.

Horizontal Practices is a strand of LPS programming dedicated to promoting peer-to-peer learning and non-hierarchical spaces for conversation.

@joycetreasure
#HorizontalPractices A person stands at an altar-like table, pausing to lift a mask. In front of the table, various objects are arranged in a circle on the floor, suggesting a ritual setup. by @joycetreasure

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a month ago

SYN4SYS: Sankofa
Acrylic and oil, copper leaf on canvas
90 × 60 × 2 cm
2026

Originates from a photograph taken by my daughter on my birthday in 2022, alongside performance characters captured during my Stryx: SPOT VR Residency in 2022.

#performance #oilpaint #copperleaf by @joycetreasure

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a month ago

Can I ask institutions and curators to stop asking us to invest a great deal of our thought and time in developing ideas and workshops with no pay. What makes this more frustrating is when we ask about the pay, our question is met with disdain, as if it’s an unreasonable question! Also, when you posit “in kind” from your regular paid positions, “in kind” from our freelance positions looks very, very different. I’ve done an enormous amount of “in kind” with no regular income, so know this - when I come and I ask precisely how you see how the collaboration is going to work by the means of a contract, that’s me looking out for myself. Not me being difficult. I understand that funding and applications shift and change beyond anyone’s control. However, could you do us the decency of articulating this, please. When an organisation contacts you to say that they have money set aside for the work, tells you they will communicate with you, let’s say in April, and then doesn’t follow through or communicate at all, that is unexceptionable. Institutions have a duty of care. These decisions and lack of communication have knock-on effects that we then have to justify elsewhere.

Clear communication is important to me, particularly in work that speaks of care, reciprocity, and relationships with artists. When we are invited to contribute our ideas, knowledge, and labour, only for communication to cease without any explanation, it’s extractive.

Quite frankly, having to repeatedly raise this issue with organisations, curators, and scholars who position themselves as leaders in the field of art ecology is exhausting. I’m exhausted!! A simple acknowledgement goes a very long way. If as an institution you’re going to speak about care publicly, then it would be great to see that ripple out beyond the walls.

(Con’t in comments) by @joycetreasure

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2 months ago

LOVE THAT - Episode 04, ‘Tracking Epistemic Violence’

Sunday, 19 April 2026 at 14:20

Kristie Dotson, 2011 by @joycetreasure

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2 months ago

Thus Spoke The Prophet of Dixie

I first shared this painting in December 2024. The painting is a reflection on Zora Neale Hurston’s sermon on the “Pet Negro,” which remains an important point of departure and keeps showing up in my lived experience and the social world.

I’ve been thinking about Hurston’s “Pet Negro” alongside Fakhry Davids’ writing on the psychic organisation of racism, particularly the concepts of projection and splitting. Davids describes projection as the process by which unacceptable feelings or impulses are attributed to others, while splitting involves dividing people or groups into all-good or all-bad categories. These psychological mechanisms help sustain racial hierarchies by positioning Black individuals in simplified, confined roles.

What interests me is when a person who has been positioned, imagined or expected to occupy a particular place no longer performs that position. When we refuse respectability politics as the measure by which we are to be understood. I’ve been observing closely how there’s an emotional stereotype prepared for us as a knee-jerk response to those micro-aggressions. My work is concerned with what happens when we address our emotion on our own terms, rather than allowing ourselves to be contained by the dominant binary linked to the colonial project.

There’s a movement from pet to threat that is evident and keeps showing up in my lived experience. The term was coined in 2013 through research led by Black women Dr Kecia Thomas, Dr Juanita Johnson-Bailey, Dr Rosemary Phelps, Dr Ny Mia Tran and Lindsey Johnson. They describe the shift whereby Black women can move from being regarded as exceptionally valued to being perceived as threatening as their competence, confidence and authority become more visible.

con’t ➡️ in comments by @joycetreasure

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2 months ago

I don’t know who needs to see this, but I am sick and tired of the number of propositions and open calls that position joy as a delivery outcome. I am not saying joy isn’t an important emotion. That joy should in any way be prevented, should it arise, but for sanity’s sake, please do not allow this to become the ‘fix-all’ for a broader and much richer field of experiences. It literally hurts my heart to see call after call, harping on about joy as though we are stuck in some crazy Stepford Wives nightmare. Yes, joy can be a form of resistance, of course, but so can all the litany of other emotions. We are going through A LOT at the moment, and every emotion (such as rage) is truly valid, but most importantly, it’s what we do with it that matters. White (supremacists) men are out here using it to literally kill us, while we are out here just BEING.

Stop asking us to be joyous and nice to your liberal acts of violence. I can’t speak to you directly because to do so means further acts of erasure, denial and character assassination campaigns to destroy us. I refuse to come to your table and speak my truth - FOR FREE!! I can see what it does, and I’m beside myself with grief and anger right now. So excuse me for being infuriated by this ridiculous call for joy when we are being bombarded with so much violence.

Any artist worth their salt does not want to be funnelled into some kind of homogenised practice prepackaged, so as not to upset that normalised idea of being, which refuses to see itself. But such is funding, or lack of, that we are having to distort and repackage ourselves OUTSIDE our methodologies or choose not to show up at all, to the joy meetings.

Lots of love,

JOYce by @joycetreasure

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2 months ago

LOVE THAT - Episode 03, “Black Rage”
Sunday, 19 April 2026 at 14:52

Beverly Stoute, 2021 by @joycetreasure

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2 months ago

Tell My Horse I & Tell My Horse II

Painting Installation & Performance Archive
Break ∀way State reimagines the video Breakaway State (2020) through paintings drawn from stills in the footage.

I’m continuously interested in what the body remembers, and how costume and movement can carry histories. Through my painting, I’m able to return to the body, seeing these moments as scores…

Donatella Barbieri, whose work writes about costume as active within live performance – something that prepares, reveals and receives the body - correlates with notions of return having no temporal location. This idea of return resonates with African belief systems, where time is understood as relational.

This relationship between clothing, the body, and human existence in time makes me think of costume as collaborative. The same can be thought when considering objects and what we might choose to work with. And then, having a choice might be thought of as a luxury. This reminds me of the artists I met in Haiti, whose material options are limited to what is available, such as rubber and cardboard. Discarded dolls, skulls and bones adorned with sparkling remnants of jewellery, and glistening metals.

Costume, in these paintings, can signify cultural and theoretical ideas, and also depict broader themes or movements that contribute to the formation of cultural memory.

#zoranealehurston by @joycetreasure

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2 months ago