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

I work with ideas themed around a connection to or dislocation from a sense of place. I think of the things that are not visible juxtaposed with the obvious things that are, the smallest of small structures that hold immense things together. I explore natural environments and constructed places for visual stimuli, moving through spaces collecting images, marks and colour palettes. I also collect imagery from print and digital resources working in a collage manner, building ideas through layered information. Topographical maps, satellite photography, architectural drawings, biology, biotechnology, and medical imagery inform my visual language. What we have come to understand about ourselves, our being, and our bodies influence the spaces we move through. Extensive analysis within multiple complex fields of study is testament to an unceasing curiosity for an understanding of a sense of place. It is this delight in discovery that is central to my work.

I develop these thoughts and images mainly through field research, reading and sketching. From this information I explore concepts further through a number of media such as painting, printmaking, drawing and sculpture. 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 images can be perceived as cellular or bodily, cells and atoms working together within quiet spaces. 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 experiences, places, the presence of being or lack thereof speaking to the collective consciousness of human/environmental relations.