Ravinder has an Honours BFA from McMaster University. Upon graduating, Ravinder immersed
herself in the arts community in Hamilton, including regularly exhibiting her work and
volunteering on art committees. She worked at the Art Gallery of Hamilton from 1997—1999,
broadening her exposure to national artists, public collections and art education.
Ravinder returned to painting and art-making after a ten year unplanned hiatus (2003—2013).
During this time, and moving forward, she has devoted herself to raising three children and
recovering from an aggressive form of cancer.
Ravinder’s unique voice is only one of few South Asian women producing art in Hamilton. Her
work is autobiographical and is often series based. While working under the larger theme of the
mind/body connection, Ravinder has spent the last few years focussing on and moving towards
wholeness: mind, body and spirit. She explores various aspects of the mind/body connection
throughout her work—trauma and energy medicine, meditation and mental health, memory and
remembrance and neuroplasticity. Ravinder’s work addresses dysfunctional family systems,
misogyny, racism, displacement as seen through the eyes of an immigrant, and what it means
to be a woman of colour.
Ravinder is largely an abstract painter who works primarily in acrylics on canvas and paper. Her
paintings often explore dichotomies—playing between micro and macroscopic, and biological
and geological forms. She uses layers of pattern and texture, drawn from her South Asian
heritage, combined with nature, the body and the landscape. Her use of colour is rich, bold and
dramatic. Her work post cancer includes the circle—a symbol of totality and wholeness, of
perfection, of sacredness.
The artist has recently been working with fabrics and fibre based materials creating more
sculptural works. These are represented in Ravinder’s work titled, The Gold Box Series, an
ongoing series since 2020. This series invites the viewer into the artist’s stories as a survivor of
trauma. The gold borders of each shadow box isolate fragments of a personal reflection of
intersectional experience. Ravinder’s use of an intimate voice and scale captures invisible
systems—racial, patriarchal, systemic…She isolates and intergrates—painting, braiding, writing,
gilding and framing in the representation of those systems as they are prescribed both upon the
body and in the body.
Ravinder is a first generation immigrant, born in England and migrating to Canada in 1975. Her
parents owned their own textile manufacturing factories in both countries. Her use of pattern
and ‘textiles’ echoes this backdrop. Ravinder also uses ‘stitching’ in her paintings and fibre
works, referencing both her childhood environment and also as a recognition of the extreme
medical procedures she has undergone.