Audra Townsend

I am a self-taught British-born Afro-Jamaican Canadian abstract and mixed media artist based in the Greater Toronto Area. I blend my formal training as a Sociocultural Anthropologist with highly textured, tactile, and intuitive artwork that explores the Caribbean diaspora. My pieces map geographic spaces alongside the emotional, historical, and migratory journeys of my Jamaican family as they moved from Jamaica to Britain and then to Canada. I tell these stories through crisscrossing and squiggly lines that separate geometric shapes and colours, building layered surfaces using everyday materials like pencil, sometimes food packaging such as Shin Noodle Packaging, and text from books, newspapers, or magazine articles.