I was born in San Francisco and grew up outside of New York City, in Montclair, New Jersey. I come from a family of modest means. My father was a news photographer in the military and left both professions for factory work when I was about two years old. Coloring books and paint by number sets were my only exposure to art until I was mesmerized by Michelangelo's Pieta at the 1964 World's Fair in Queens, New York. In 1968 I began studying mathematics at Bradley University in Illinois but after one semester, encouraged by friends, I changed my major and entered the College of Art. At 18 years old I walked into my first art class and found my passion. Since then this passion has defined my life.

Graduate school in Amherst Massachusetts is where I began to find my voice as an artist. I was transfixed by the color and texture of the natural world around me and started to reference the landscape in abstract, intricately detailed geometric work. Large areas of mark-making with colored pencil, graphite, oil pastel and pastel, over thin veils of acrylic paint, replaced the heavy paint layers of my earlier canvases. Drawing became a more integral part of my process.

In 1978 I was awarded an eight month fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown Massachusetts. Looking closely at architecture in the landscape, my new images incorporated elements of the built world. It was in Provincetown that observational drawing became a regular practice for me. Upon returning home to Northampton Massachusetts in 1979, I became immersed in a large public art project with the Hestia Art Collective. We researched, designed, and then painted a 3600 sq ft outdoor mural depicting the history of women in Northampton. Funded by several art and humanities grants, the painting was awarded a Governor's Design Award in 1986 and was restored by the community in 2004.

I moved to New York in 1980 where jobs at the Whitney Museum and the Blum Helman Gallery gave me immediate access to cutting edge contemporary art. While in New York I made my first trips to Italy in 1983 and 1984 and spent weeks looking at paintings by Giotto, Fra Angelico, and Piero della Francesca. A year later I moved to Boston. In 1993 I spent a week in the old city of Pompeii with a group of cultural anthropologists studying household shrines. As they measured and mapped, I sketched the niches and mosaic designs adorning the ancient walls and became fascinated with a large floor labyrinth in one of the houses. This initiated research into cross cultural symbols, which I investigated in more personal narratives entitled Internal Landscapes. I began using supports like gypsum board, mulberry paper, and limestone for work with, graphite, oil paint, watercolor and egg tempera. In addition to their appealing physical properties, they referenced the traditions of art which informed my work.

In March of 2001, I began a series of drawings entitled Smoke. These images have both a physical presence and an ephemeral quality and reference events caused by man or nature. Six months later planes flew into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon killing more than three thousand. My emotional response to this tragedy continues to filter into my work. Watching, in real time, the television images of smoke billowing from buildings in New York and Washington DC, and then later from the bombed desert landscape in Afghanistan, there with a compelling synchronicity with the smoke drawings on my studio walls.

My recent drawings are made with gunpowder and graphite. Writing about this work Joseph Carroll, Director of Carroll and Sons Gallery and the Boston Drawing Project, notes "Ms. Bond's work succeeds in the difficult transference of photographic pictorial information, editing and inventing details, into compelling drawings. The drawings reflect their source material by staying true to the black and white newspaper images. In a more interesting way, the drawings, like the newspaper images are, at a distance, highly resolved down to the last hair and wrinkle. Upon close inspection, where the newspaper images will dissolve into a series of Benday dots, the drawings also break down into areas of tone. The simple idea of taking a small image and blowing it up, taking transitory mechanically reproduced image and recreating it by hand instills a sense of time in the drawing to powerful effect."

For many years I have been depicting casualties of war. With my newest drawing series, entitled Peacemakers, I am making gunpowder portraits of individuals. Some I have met briefly, others I know quite well. What they share are qualities of kindness and compassion - these drawings honor their actions. I use gunpowder as a metaphor. Like the subjects of these portraits, we all have the potential to promote peace, to create rather than destroy.