Clara Deltort
Fine Arts
Biography
My practice is rooted in an embodied exploration of grief, love, and the deep interspecies bond between humans and dogs. Through sculpture, installation, and performance, I investigate the emotional and physical terrain of loss, what I call grieving space and the symbolic power of the dog as both companion and mirror. My life has been closely connected with Eiros and Saïdi, Spanish water dogs who are more than muses, they are collaborators. Their presence, gaze, and even absence shape the works I create. These include intimate photographic studies, mutated toys, and sculptural environments made of bamboo, glass, screws, and traces of dog hair and scent. Materials carry memory, and I use them to evoke a kind of primal tactility a physicality that speaks to endurance, strength, and the emotional weight of care. Ultimately, my work is about finding a new language for closeness and grief, one that is sensory, raw, and tender.
The Husk
Eiros, Clara & Saïdi Deltort "The Husk" is a structure of grief built for one dog and one human. It’s a space of shared mourning and multispecies intimacy, dedicated to Eiros, Clara’s late companion, a Spanish water dog whose presence continues to shape her work even in absence. Constructed from bamboo, the sculpture first emerged as a shelter for dogs, then evolved to accommodate humans echoing the entangled lives and shared spaces we create with our animal kin. Its form invites to rest, stillness and a mutual gaze between species. Installed outdoors, it responds to the sun and the body. When lying down within it, the world is filtered through yellow a color perceptible to both humans and dogs. This shifting light becomes a shared lens, a tender hallucination of grief. The dome is tiled with hand-cut, slumped, and pigmented glass, using a yellow silver stain, a medieval technique once used in ecclesiastical windows and alchemical symbols of the divine. Silver compounds, when fired into glass, produce luminous golden hues transfiguring light into meaning. Here, that same process is recast as a language of mourning. The yellow tiles become both relic and ritual: filtering time, heat, and the chemical memory of light. Some tiles are bound to the bamboo with rope felted from Eiros’s hair; others are made entirely from his felt. These elements physical traces, binding material,memory and smell. After a year of collaboration with a chemist and a perfumer, Eiros’s specific odor, his molecular signature, has being reconstructed. The smell will slowly enter the space, inviting both dogs and humans to confront the haunting presence of a body no longer here. A husk is what remains when the living core has departed: the shell, the skin, the cast-off sheath. In mythology and mysticism, the husk marks the threshold between spirit and matter, a vessel once inhabited, now emptied, yet still echoing with memory. In this work, "The Husk" becomes both literal and symbolic: a shelter shaped by love and loss, where absence finds form.