lwrds duniam
b. 1984
Pronouns: they/them
lwrds (pronounced ‘lords’) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, community educator, independent researcher, and 2019 OCAD University graduate (BFA Integrated Media) living and creating in Tkaronto. Their ARTivist practice is informed by frameworks of Decolonial Critical Theory and is intersectional, anti-racist, anti-oppressive, sex-positive, trauma-informed, and grounded in disability justice. With a focus on Critical Design and decolonial research practices and pedagogies, they have been working as a freelance artist/designer for the past decade. Their studio practice conjures performance, sculptural, illustrative, poetic, and remediated mixed-media outcomes, emerging from a foundation of transgressive witchy knowledge, traversing the multiple realms of their idiosyncratic spirituality.
lwrds’ work as an artist responds to their personal journey of healing sexual trauma at the intersections of gender variance, Blackness and Indigeneity (complicated by an imposed latinidad they reject due to its colonial underpinnings), and disability, as a neurodivergent, chronically ill person. A born storyteller with a deep commitment to healing personal and collective traumas, their art-making approach is an intuitive process of learning with other more-than-human beings, valuing energetic exchanges with all that exists. As a creator, they place sexual liberation and gender plurality at the crux of personal healing and rebirth, responding to an ancestral call to reclaim their power, rejecting respectability politics and white supremacist cis-heteronormativity in order to reimagine decolonial futures where we are all safe to blossom into our truest selves.