lwrds duniam

a Pachamama spell
(work-in-progress, detail)

collaborating with the land herself, Pachamama—Mother Earth, this work is emerging as a ritual for radical presence, imprinting broken pieces of hybrid hurting selves, and finding healing through ancient arboreal magic.

lwrds duniam (b. 1984) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, 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, grounded in disability justice, and decolonial research practices and pedagogies. They’ve been working as a freelance artist/designer for over a decade. lwrds’ 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. Their work responds to their 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. lwrds’ art-making approach is an intuitive process of learning with more-than-human beings, valuing energetic exchanges with all that exists. 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.