Born in Colombo Sri Lanka, Frances Ferdinands is a Toronto-based Canadian artist. She holds a Visual Arts degree from York University, an A.R.C.T. (Piano) from the Royal Conservatory of Music, and Education degree from University of Toronto.

As a young Art student she was co-editor of Eclectic Eve: a Collection of Fifty Interviews with Toronto Women Artists. (Coach House Press, 1973). Noted American art historian and critic Lucy Lippard wrote, “Eclectic Eve is a book I’ve often used and much enjoyed. I wish other cities would do the same.” Ferdinands’ paintings are featured in two Artbooks: Rethinking Acrylic” (Northlight Books, 2008) and Acrylic Innovation (Northlight Books, 2010). She created the winning design for the 2017 Diwali commemorative coin and the 2019 Gold Multi-Cultural Coin “celebrating Diversity and Light” for the Royal Canadian Mint.

Ferdinands has exhibited her work for over three decades across Canada and the United States and as far afield as New York, Paris, Bogota, London, and Honolulu. She is the recipient of many Arts Council Grants. Her paintings are held in private, corporate, and museum collections.

In 2015 and 2017, Ferdinands returned to her homeland to be mentored in traditional arts and crafts studying temple mural painting, bobbin lace making, and mask making. This experience served to enrich her understanding of her Sri Lankan heritage and sense of place within it. The experience also spawned new work including the “Atomizer” collection – a series of 10 works which the ROM purchased.

Her most recent paintings, the “Cultural Intersections” series hover between representation and abstraction and feature a mix of Western, Middle Eastern, and South Asian imagery and patterning. Colourful, active and densely layered they celebrate within a contemporary framework the long and overlapping traditions of decoration and craftsmanship that are the underpinnings of many non-western cultures.

In early 2019 she was awarded a Chalmers Fellowship to travel to London England to study Islamic Patterning. The knowledge gained further expanded her focus on the exploration of visual cultural differences and cross-cultural fertilization and speaks of the “in-between” of varied social and cultural realities she inhabits.