About The Artist

Deltra grew up surrounded by creativity, with her mother and grandmother as painters and her father a musician. She began expressing herself through painting and drawing, showing her work with the Saskatchewan Arts Council in 1989 and illustrating a book in 1990. After moving to Alberta, she studied Visual Communications at Medicine Hat College (1993), starting a graphic design career in Edmonton that lasted over 10 years, serving clients internationally in education, retail industry, and oil sectors.

In 1999, she mentored young artists at Jasper Place High School and began showing her paintings in group and solo exhibits. In the early 2000s, she began teaching community art classes in Edmonton and later worked as a Program Specialist at the Edmonton City Arts Center (2017-2022), teaching adult artists about design.

Deltra earned a Bachelor of Fine Art with distinction from the University of Alberta in 2017. In 2018, she took part in the Canadian Wilderness Artist Residency in Yukon, canoeing the Yukon River for 17 days on traditional First Nations territories. This experience deeply influenced her life and work.

She now splits her time between her home studio and the Society of Northern Alberta Printmakers (SNAP) on Treaty 6 territory, exhibiting paintings, working on graphic design and illustration projects, and teaching community art classes.

Current CV available upon request

About The Work

Place-making and belonging are central themes I consider deeply through a multidisciplinary visual art language as I explore diverse ways to communicate and express the complex inner landscape. Growing up on a farm, I spent my formative childhood years wandering and engaging intimately with the water and shorelines of what are known as the "prairie potholes" of the southern Saskatchewan prairies in Canada. It was during those early, impressionable years that a profound and abiding desire to belong became intricately linked with my direct and personal relationship to the natural world. Still today, I am most happy when I am outside.

Early in my artistic practice, I began developing intricate concepts of personal place-making through the tradition of still life oil painting, carefully collecting and arranging both man-made and organic objects as reference material. My academic studies on human-environmental relationships further expanded my understanding of the collective consciousness in relation to our intrinsic sense of belonging within the world. In her insightful book The Enchanted Life, Sharon Blackie eloquently discusses the idea of place-making as “being intrinsic to our being” and highlights the “need to make sense of, and find meaning in, our relationship to the places we inhabit, as it is a fundamental and universal part of the human journey in this world.” Through immersive experiences in nature and committed experimentation with various creative processes, I strive to make sense of, find deep meaning in, and thoughtfully communicate the profound wonder I continuously experience in this shared existence.

When immersing myself in field research, I meticulously sketch, photograph, and write about observations in nature and other spaces, and the nuances of daily experiences. Back in the studio, numerous making processes facilitate the further evolution of my visual language. I find the expressive qualities one medium often influence and inform another, sparking a dynamic chain reaction of exploration across painting, print-based work, illustrations, installation, and sculpture, all rich with rhythmic and poetic narratives.