Clara DeGalan

Clara DeGalan was born in Detroit, MI and spent her early years dividing time between the city and a secluded cabin in northern MI, learning to walk between worlds. She earned her BFA at The University of MIchigan and her MFA at Wayne State University. She has worked as an adjunct instructor, personal assistant, and restaurant manager. Her primary subject is landscape. She currently lives in Ann Arbor, MI.

Her studio practice seeks an intimate, reverent relationship with the Earth on which she lives by opening a path between the visible world and the mythic realm of the psyche. She explores this intention with a tool kit of imagery and objects, including landscape, art history, blue painter’s tape, physical artifacts such as feathers, birch bark, seed pods, and wood, Jungian archetypes, New Age imagery, and resonant tidbits from popular culture. She aims, with this practice, to upend accepted ideas of value, commodity, and sophistication in a way that, hopefully, makes way for new ideas about our relationship to our history, our land, and our spiritual life.