Audra Townsend

Audra is a free-spirited British-born Jamaican Canadian abstract and mixed media artist based in Toronto. She is a trained Sociocultural Anthropologist, who believes as humans, art is a manifestation of our curiosity about the material world and, as such, an essential part of what it means to be human. To explore this relationship between art and the human experience, Audra borrows from Intuitive and Tactile Art forms. Her work is characterized by a dense network of crisscrossing (and squiggly) lines separating rectangles of multiple shapes, made of different materials, earthy and celestial colours and textures from her use of materials such as sand and stone. Viewers of her work are stimulated through an alternation of physical and visual surfaces.

Biography
Audra is self taught. She took an Intuitive Abstract Workshop in the Spring of 2019 and enjoyed so much that she began ongoing private coaching sessions. She received an MA in Anthropological Research from the University of Manchester in England. She also holds honours degrees in Social-Cultural Anthropology and Administrative Studies from York University in Toronto, Ontario and a Media Writing Diploma from Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario.
Exhibitions:

Audra participated in Art Vancouver 2023; Propeller Art Gallery Unframed Exhibit January 2023 and Off-Wall Exhibit 2022; Toronto Art Crawl Christmas Market November 2022; Riverdale Art Walk June 2022, and exhibited 6 of her paintings at Art Vancouver May, 2022. Paintings from her Urban Organic Series (Urbanite, Washout, and Drop) were featured in a Collective Art Show hosted by the Van Gogh Art Gallery in Madrid, Spain, in April/May 2021. Audra’s Ordinary Affects paintings (Peeling Paint, Close Affinity and Transitioning) were featured in the DE.MO Lifestyle, September 2021 exhibit hosted by the MADS Art Gallery in Milan. Urbanite, Washout, and Drop were also exhibited at the Art3F contemporary art fair in Brussels in November 2021.