About Joy

Joy Foulds grew up in Whitby, a small fishing town on the North East Coast of the UK. As a child, she spent hours exploring the tide line, collecting sea glass, shells and driftwood smoothed and shaped in the waves. Her creativity emerged whilst young, sketching wild flowers, customising clothes, and later painting murals.  She moved to York to study Art and Design, followed by Community Arts in Manchester.  She developed a passion for photography, drawn to neglected buildings, urban decay, and the quiet ways nature reclaims the landscape.

Joy’s work is rooted in an obsession with layers, both in the world around her and in people. She explores surfaces that reveal history, walls, billboards, or forgotten spaces and considers the layers that shape human experience: memory, personality, culture and emotion. Some layers protect, some are imposed, some are chosen; some are permanent and others shift over time. Through mixed media, painting, drawing, photography, and digital journaling, she creates textured, layered work that invites viewers to reflect on the visible and hidden elements that make us who we are.

Joy enjoys the process of adding, covering, scraping back and revealing, allowing fragments of what came before to remain visible. Retro patterns, natural forms, marks and found textures often find their way into her work.  Her practice is driven by curiosity and a desire to look beneath the surface, exploring beauty, vulnerability, memory and the things that shape who we become.

Ultimately, Joy wants her work to invite people to pause, look a little closer and find something of their own story within it.