Demelza Toy Toy
Artist Statement
I am a London based multi-disciplinary artist engaged with performance, sound and collaborative modes of practice as strategies of resistance to narratives of cultural dominance.
The purpose of my interventions through art making is to disrupt and interrogate power dynamics and challenge cultural biases. I am interested in the space that exists between the self and the world and communicating narratives that exist in these spaces. I see my work as an investigation into current and historical socio-political frameworks and how we exist within these frameworks. My work looks to reflect these connections, questions, experiences and ideas in its production and reception.
A praxis of decoloniality combined with a feminist approach inform my practice in the challenging of Western notions of universality, neutrality and linear evolution. By challenging normativity and creating possibility through uncertainty I look to displace the status-quo. In exploring a methodology of generosity in collaborative works I look to displace hierarchy.
I consider my works 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 also take on the form of self care and protection against violence enacted within these structures and systems.