Tamara Bond: A Gentler Peacock

I grew up in a small enclave of houses surrounded by undeveloped land, skirted by the property of a farmer who inexplicably kept peacocks.  I do not like peacocks.  They wail like banshees and disrupt the family dogs and in the morning scream to wake the dead. They do the same thing, exactly, in the middle of the night, causing fantasy-prone girls to think of werewolves and of ghosts.  But I do like this mixed media peacock art by Tamara Bond.

Bond’s storybook imagery is meant to “mythologize and reorganize experiences and process the everyday,” she says. This is precisely what she has accomplished for me. Her softly contoured, muted birds (inspired by a petting zoo at Beacon Hill Park in Victoria, B.C.) do not resemble the sharp-voiced, ill-tempered peacocks that bedevilled my youth.

Her drawing process involves creating imaginary characters and narratives, which are often based on real events and experiences.  Using collage, mixed media, and rubber stamps as a rudimentary printmaking method, Bond experiments with the limits of drawing, painting and imagination – Notes from exhibition at Bau-Xi Gallery, Vancouver

Tamara Bond graduated from Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design with a degree in Visual Arts in 2001. Her contemporary figurative drawings and books have been shown across Canada.  She has received a Canada Council Grant, a Saskatchewan Arts Board Grant and is a collective member of Jackpine Press.