Clara Laratta is an intermedia artist and educator based in Hamilton. She holds a Master of Fine Arts and a Graduate Certificate in University Teaching from the University of Waterloo, as well as an Honours Bachelor of Fine Arts with distinction from McMaster University. Her practice utilizes research-creation methodologies to explore wholeness as a rhizomatic entanglement of material, ecological, and embodied systems.

Working across sculptural installation, alternative photographic processes, and time-based media, Laratta treats materials and organic matter as active participants in her work. Her investigations also involve an embodied approach to drawing and mark-making, resulting in informal archival structures; collections of impressions and residues that examine how resilience, adaptation, and care are carried across environments and bodies. By intertwining personal history with contemporary interdisciplinary research, she focuses on art’s capacity to investigate the mapping of biophysical and lived experience.

Exhibiting across Canada and internationally, Laratta is the inaugural Artist in Residence at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Science and has participated in residencies including those at Artscape Gibraltar Point, Art Hubs, and the Ayatana Artists’ Research Program. Her work is represented in over twenty archival and permanent collections worldwide, held primarily as part of curated exhibition archives. These include the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, McMaster University, the Museum für Kommunikation in Berlin and Bern, and the Canadian Association for Health Humanities Archive. She is a member of the CARBON Collective, and her practice is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.