Pandora Mond

Pandora Mond studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford (1979-82). Her work explores the complexity of the natural world, the wider universe and the limits of human perception. Working in oil and mixed media, often on a large scale, Mond interprets terrestrial and cosmic subjects in gestural, painterly brush strokes which blur the distinction between abstraction and representation. Aiming at universality as opposed to specificity, for many years her practice has focused on an examination of the sea in which paintings of endless ocean waves draw the viewer beyond the surface of the paint into a poetic world of infinite possibilities, embodying its vastness, its profound force as well as its tranquillity.

In her more recent paintings, the result of a 2014 Leverhulme Trust Artist Residency during which she worked alongside Astrophysics at Exeter University, Mond plays with the paradox of making the invisible visible, visualising the imagined terrain of extra-solar planets as yet imperceptible to science. The series of large-scale tondos made with oil and mineral powders are a visceral interpretation of the historical and philosophical implications of the discovery of these Exoplanets. Images of unseen unknown planets, they are imbued with a dynamism generated by a meeting of art and science; one inherently abstract in its hypothesis and the other driven by process and material concerns. As with her study of the sea, in the “Planets" series Mond strives to reduce the image to the essence of the subject, enabling them to communicate more directly and viscerally with the viewer.

Pandora Mind has exhibited widely both in the UK and Europe, including Houghton Hall, Norfolk (2019); The Changing State  of Water, The Hospital Club, London (2018); Sensibilities of Belonging with NoonPowell, Mall Galleries, London (2018); London Art Fair (2017), Exoplanets, La Maison des Polytechniciens, Paris (2015); LAPADA London (2016); The Royal West of England Academy (2012); Cadogan Contemporary, London (2014), Sotheby's, London (2003) and Jonathan Clark, London (2007).

Pandora Mond currently lives and works in Norfolk.