Martha Townsend graduated with an undergraduate degree from the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design in 1978. She moved to Montreal the following year, teaching at Concordia University and working at Galerie Optica and the Saidye Bronfman Centre. In 1991, she moved to New York for several years before returning to Montreal. Townsend’s intimist sculptures have been shown across Canada and in Europe. After focusing initially on reassembling found objects, she began creating more abstract, geometric sculptures that featured basic shapes – often cubes, holes and particularly circles and spheres. For the past several years, she has been creating works with flat colours: Tondo Tondo (2006), for example, evokes the convergence of earth and sky, comprising a circle of veined wood of which one half is untouched while the other half has been tinted blue.
SEE:
« Surplus et satiété » by Jean-Pierre Le Grand, ESPACE, vol. 7, #4, p. 11.
« Contingent : Eva Hesse, Elspeth Pratt, Martha Townsend » by Greg Beatty, ESPACE #36, p. 31.
« Oeuvre », ESPACE #75, p. 13.
« Sculpture and Its Double » by Jean-Michel Ross, ESPACE #75, p. 15.
« Histoires de sculpt(e)ure » by Rose Marie Arbour, ESPACE, vol. 4, #3, p. 5.
« D’Expo 67 à Artefact 2007 » by Pascale McGarry, ESPACE #82, p. 40.
« La sculpture dans des champs élargis » by Gilles Daigneault, ESPACE #94, p. 23.
