Tori Pounds is an English painter based between West Sussex and Mexico City. Her works encounter the alien and the familiarity of nostalgic items and snapshots of time, a game of cat and mouse between the real and surreal, all characterized through layering techniques of oil paint on canvas. She completed her BFA at the Academy Minerva in Groningen, the Netherlands (2017), further studying painting at Hunter College in New York. After graduating, her work in veterinary hospitals helped shape a conceptual development, making comparisons with the fragility of life found in surgery and her experience with grief. She has exhibited in Berlin, Amsterdam, Mexico City and New York with works most currently at JO-HS, ZsonaMaco and El Cuarto de Máquinas, part of Galería Hilario Galguera.

In her work, semi-surreal paintings explore the way in which objects can hold memory and the ultimate unreliability of looking back. Visuals are cropped and blurred to encourage the viewer to fill in the gaps with their own nostalgia. Leather car seats bring back memories of childhood journeys; interiors, exteriors and still lifes of her “home” remind us of the grandness in the mundane moments of solitude. The maternal figure is ambiguous and shown behind a lens, statue-like or hidden, a recurrent theme connected to her relationship with loss, power and motherhood. There is a suggestion of some surreal existence and further questions about her own reality, in an effort to retrieve what is lost.