Demelza Woodbridge AKA Demelza Toy Toy is a London based non-media specific artist engaged predominantly with performance, sound and collaborative modes of practice as strategies of resistance to narratives of cultural dominance.
The purpose of her interventions through art making is to disrupt and interrogate power dynamics and challenge cultural biases. Demelza is interested in the space that exists between the self and the world, and communicating narratives that exist in these spaces. She understands her work as an investigation into current and historical socio-political frameworks and how we exist within these frameworks. Her work looks to synthesize these connections, questions, experiences and ideas in its production and reception.
A praxis of decoloniality combined with a feminist approach inform her practice in the challenging of Western notions of universality, neutrality and linear evolution. By challenging normativity and creating possibility through uncertainty Demelza looks to displace the status-quo. In exploring a methodology of generosity in collaborative works she looks to displace hierarchy.
I considers her work as tools to activate spaces for the potential of the audience to reflect upon their own complicity in the systems and structures that maintain and produce systems of dominance. These works for the artist are also a form of self care and protection against violence enacted within these structures and systems.