Neena Mand (working under her artist name Neena atMA) is an Australian and British artist of Indian heritage based in Sydney, working from her Hawkesbury River studio. Over the past five years, she has transitioned from architectural academia to a dedicated contemporary art practice. Working from her studios in the Hawkesbury provides the connection to nature and creation, giving both the solitude to explore and the inspiration to synthesise her interpretations.

As an academic Neena taught architecture at the University of Newcastle and Sydney University, where she was awarded her PhD, Constructing Architecture and Interpreting Identity, she currently continues to teach at Sydney University. Neena’s research interests include postcolonial and feminist and critical theories, Asian architecture and urbanism, sustainability and transport infrastructure, and the international practice of architecture.

Neena’s personal and professional development has been facilitated through international travel and working with eminent architects and practices. In India working with S.D Sharma who worked with Le Corbusier, the designer of the new city of Chandigarh. In London she worked with BDP and continued her career development travelling to Japan working with Kisho Kurokawa and Associates, the key exponent of the Metabolist movement and then in Malaysia working with Hijjas Kasturi, the pioneering figure of Malaysian modern architecture.  She has worked on various scales of architectural projects ranging from multi-million-dollar urban developments to individual houses and community projects.

Primordial Pulse 

The Primordial Pulse series traces creation as a continuum — a vibration moving from formlessness to form. Neena Mand invites the viewer to pause, reflect, and enter this continuum — to feel the vibration of creation, to encounter the spark that arises between rasa and form, and to experience the living dialogue between creator, creation, and observer. Each artwork is uniquely conceptualized and underpinned by years of research, intellectual analysis and abstract interpretations.

Geometry underpins the work, but she also explores fluid, curvilinear forms. Circles, lines, and points meet sinuous curves, waves, and infinity-like shapes — symbolizing rivers of energy, flow, and continuity. A point is potential; a line is movement; a circle is completeness; a curve or river-like form expresses ongoing emergence and the rhythm of life itself. These forms allow her to express creator, creation beyond representation, capturing both structure and flow.

In this series, black represents the unknown, the primordial field; white evokes illumination, clarity, and consciousness; and gold traces the divine spark, the trace of the formless. Together, these colours allow her to depict the journey from nothingness to emergence, to map the movement of eons, light, and coming to presence across the canvas.

The Primordial Pulse asks us to pause, sense subtle vibrations, and encounter the interplay of essence, emergence, and interconnectedness.

Neena Mand is a storyteller of space and spirit an architect and academic turned artist whose evolving practice moves fluidly between cultural memory, intuition, and universal inquiry.

The Unfolding Continuum is the overarching framework of her art practice—an ever-evolving extension of abstraction, her work arises from a desire to move beyond declarative meaning toward the subtle logic of suggestion, evocation, and resonance. To articulate this vision, Neena has developed an aesthetic and conceptual framework called Dhvanic Abstraction. Rooted in the ancient Indian aesthetic principle of dhvani—the art of suggestion— extending this idea into a visual and spatial practice that engages abstraction, architecture, and cross-cultural philosophy.

Unlike the classical dhvani of literary poetics, her Dhvanic Abstraction is a contemporary, intuitive language where meaning arises not from representation, but through the atmospheric, the layered, and the suggestive.

Concepts of rasa (essence) and dhvani guide how she layers perception, while the Japanese idea of ma, the pause, allows silence and interval to speak. Each painting is meant as a space for dialogue — with itself and with the viewer — where resonance is experienced rather than explained.

Key to this language is porosity, a concept drawn from her architectural background. Neena reframes porosity not only as a spatial condition but as a metaphysical openness—an invitation for viewers to enter reciprocal dialogue with the artwork. The painting becomes a threshold, where the viewer and the image co-create meaning through presence, introspection and intuitive sensing

In her work she investigates universal themes such as creation, feminine agency, ecological interconnectedness, and inner awakening. Using symbolic geometries, elemental materials, and a restrained monochromatic palette, she creates spaces where the visible and invisible meet. Informed by cross-cultural philosophies, scientific cosmology, and feminist thought, her works reimagine abstraction as a site of connection.

The Unfolding Continuum is not a singular vision, but a constellation of inquiries—into what it means to create, to belong, to transform.

“Time dissolves while I paint. The work unfolds itself through process, intuition, accident, and reflection. I do not measure completion technically but how well it resonates with me — when the work speaks back and its resonance is alive. Even then, it remains incomplete until it enters dialogue with the viewer, whose memory, perception, and presence complete the continuum.”