Eleanor Bond


Eleanor Bond is a Canadian artist and art educator. Her work includes painting, printmaking, drawing and sculpture.

Early life

Eleanor Bond was born in Winnipeg to pharmacist Herbert Bond and teacher Mildred MacFarlane. She graduated from the School of Art, University of Manitoba in 1976. A previous undergraduate degree included studies in English, comparative religion and interior design, with a particular interest in the built environment and the interpretation of public space.

Work

In her Work Station and Social Centres bodies of work, Bond explores the impact of technological advances and urban design on living bodies. Bond produces staged, fictive landscapes and built urban environments. The ironic titles and futuristic overtones, cinematic scale and multiple sightlines suggest a vertigo or lifting off, as if her subjects are no longer on familiar territory. In her work, architectural projections suggest possibilities for the future that are uninhabited and in transition, a poignant parody of a world where progress may outlive its proponents. These large-scale, unstretched canvases suggest that the city is an imaginary place. Her landscapes can be interpreted as spaces that exist between illusion and reality, the visceral and the intellect, utopia and dystopia. This in-between space emphasizes a metaphorical overlay of spatial practice to topographical place.
Recent projects include the Mountain of Shame series of paintings and sculptures that mark a shift away from the social and architectural and towards the personal and the figurative. Bond creates an emotional topography in which the vulnerabilities of doubt, age and loss are mapped on the surfaces of various media.
Bond's work has been widely exhibited in Canada and internationally, including solo shows at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, the Clocktower in New York, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Museo de Arte Moderna de São Paulo in Brazil, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal and Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto. Group exhibitions have included shows at The National Gallery of Canada and the Vancouver Art Gallery as well as exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in São Paulo and Barbican Centre in London. She has been a lecturer, has held studio residencies in Paris, Banff and Canberra, Australia, and has been actively involved in Plug In ICA in Winnipeg since its inception. Bond's solo show Mountain of Shame, curated by Helga Pakasaar, was the inaugural exhibition that opened the new Plug In ICA gallery in 2010 and toured to the Illingworth Kerr Gallery at the Alberta College of Art & Design in Calgary in 2011.
Bond is currently an Associate Professor of painting and drawing who works with graduate students at Concordia University. She also maintains an active art studio in the North End, Winnipeg.