Frances Ferdinands

Born in Colombo Sri Lanka, Frances Ferdinands is an artist based in Toronto. As a young immigrant to Canada, raised in a traditional South Asian household, an awareness of these two very different cultures was a constant backdrop in her search for identity and place. Identity, ‘otherness’, cross-cultural differences and fertilization are themes found in her paintings.

Ferdinands has exhibited her paintings in solo and group exhibitions for three decades in such art centres as London, New York, Paris, Bogota and Honolulu, as well as across the Continental USA and Canada. She is the recipient of many Artist Grants and paintings are held in private, major Corporate, and Museum collections including the Royal Ontario Museum.

About this series, she shares, "My series of paintings pay homage to the legacy of the Pattern & Decoration movement and its ideals, while expressing my unique vision rooted in my South Asian heritage as a Sri Lankan immigrant and Person of Colour.”

She describes these landscapes as “exotic” illusory landscapes hovering between representation and abstraction. Largely painted intuitively, and drawing on music, art, objects, murals, tiles, textiles, wallpaper as reference, they are a mix of objects, nature imagery, patterning and ornamentation. Within the paintings I create narrative and tangential connections reflecting intersections and migrations of various cultural visual languages from South Asian to Middle Eastern to Western. “

“Within this eclectic mix they become vehicles to express my concerns for the loss of nature, the echoes of colonialism, migration and transformation. Through re-interpreting and re-contextualizing these forms within my own unique style and content, this synthesis is a way of speaking to the “in-between space” of varied social and cultural realities that I inhabit. Finally I strive to make each work political, poetic and beautiful.”

Discover more from Frances at https://www.francesferdinands.com