Deltra Powney

About the Artist

Originally from Saskatchewan Deltra moved to Alberta to attend Medicine Hat College, receiving a Visual Communications Diploma in 1993, eventually working in advertising in Edmonton. From 1999 to 2001 she mentored students at the Jasper Place High School Artist Residency in Edmonton, and started exhibiting her work. In 2017 she graduated from the University of Alberta, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with distinction focused in printmaking, intermedia, and painting. Her work has been retained by corporate, and private collectors, and the University of Alberta. Deltra divides her time between her home studio in Stony Plain, the Society of Northern Alberta Printmakers workshop in Edmonton, Alberta Printmakers in Calgary, and teaching adult painting classes at Edmonton City Arts Centre. Deltra recently traveled to the Yukon Territory to attend the Canadian Wilderness Artist Residency where she canoed the Yukon River between Whitehorse and Dawson City, an experience that has influenced her recent work.

You can follow Deltra’s art practice on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, subscribe to her newsletter blog, and attend exhibitions where she would love to chat with you in person.

About the Work

My visual language is interdisciplinary, informed by a consciousness of the Anthroprocene: what we have come to understand about our being in the world, care and physical influences on environment. I develop these thoughts mainly through reading texts about human/environmental relationships, and immersive field research experiences where I sketch, paint, and photograph as a way to document natural and constructed environments. From this documentation I explore the concepts further in my studio through a number of medium such as painting, printmaking, drawing, assemblage, sculpture, and installation. Often what one medium offers for exploration will inform another, creating a chain reaction of self realization as I react to the physicality of any given material. Some work can be perceived as cellular or bodily, other work suggest relationships between manmade and natural worlds, environments that exist within the imagination yet seem familiar. Traces of process are visible capturing the essence of experience, place, and the presence of being or the lack thereof speaking to the collective consciousness of human/environmental relations.