Non-human sensory perception has been a central focus in Biophilium studies since the 2016 inception of Biophony, a field course for aritst to listen to the sounds of the wild with specialized listening devices and to learn about hearing, auditory processing and communication in research labs in Ottawa. The program expanded into Sensoria, which focuses more broadly on non-human sensory experiences from sight and the manifestation of color, to whiskers and electroception.

We have had the pleasure of studying sensory perception with the following artists.

Click on images to see more about each artist.

Michelle Bunton

Michelle Bunton is a transdisciplinary artist/curator/derby jammer currently residing as an uninvited guest in Katarokwi-Kingston. They are one-quarter of the micropress Small Potatoes, and one-half of the artist-duo Tear Jerkers.

Prioritizing femi-queer science, SF (speculative fabulation/science fiction) and diffractive pedagogy, they aim to embody a collaborative praxis that centres queer kinship. Bunton playfully embraces the potential of failure, uncertainty and decay in their practice, often taking up sport and science as framework for their multi-media installations. Their recent work turns to slime mold/lichen/fungi and their attendant characteristics of collective action, decentralized organization and abject re-composition of matter.

Ashlee Mays, Teacher's Assistant
Pigeon Forge, TN

Director of the Museum of Infinate Outcomes

It is one thing to say something, it is another thing to write it down, and it is a completely different thing to carve, engrave, design, and print that same thing. My work focuses on these symbols that signify our human desires, and their motion. Their motion through both their mechanization of production, and the way they disseminate into banality. Many of my pieces move from place to place, sometimes through space and sometimes through ownership. Printmaking provides the conceptual spine that supports my interdisciplinary practice. My art pieces are almost always interactive, asking the viewer to physically place themselves in this portrait of connectivity. Nowadays we do not rely on movable type to get us our daily news. It seems that we no longer rely on the accuracy of the artist’s hand to illustrate scientific information. Printmaking mobilized the first information revolution. We are experiencing another one, and this one did not appear out of thin air. I am looking to expose the seemingly invisible lines that connect our day to day experiences with a larger mechanism. It appears to me that Botanists are sometimes doing the same thing. The parking ticket you got last week, the souvenir from your last vacation- these artifacts all have a complex history. They quietly shape an experience that you are actively participating in.

Isla Greenwood, London, UK

I am a multidisciplinary artist whose focus is on the ways creative energy enhances relational dynamics amongst humans and non humans. I draw from a vast field of pre existing knowledge of the world through stories and myth and a background in Anthropology, whilst combining these elements with insight and metaphor developed whilst spending time in the natural world.

Listening is a key part of my practice and my journey with music really began as a listener, and through the work of Pauline Oliveros and the deep listening practice and David Abram’s text ‘The Spell of the Sensuous. My practice includes poetry, song, electronic music, movement and movement therapy, art textiles and public speaking, all of which pivot around themes of connectedness, joy and vitality for creating and sustaining a world of energised and enlivened people during times of great change and crisis.

My practice is really a record of what I learn when paying closer attention to the nuances in perception, a diary to myself of adventures in immersion, and a gift to others who may be feeling similar things, yet feeling at a loss for language to relay them.

Stacy Fahrion, Centennial, CO
Composer, pianist, educator, just intonation enthusiast

In a 2018 interview, after writing an album of solo piano pieces called Lullabies for Arachnophobes, I was asked what I was going to do next. I responded that I was going to write an album of music for spiders that are afraid of humans. While I was half-joking, studies of non-human animals, particularly studies of how they experience sound, fascinate me, and non-human created sounds are my inspiration more than any
other music.

My music is often inspired by things like learning about the mating rituals of jumping spiders, or how ogre spiders “listen” to vibrations.
Another recent piece was inspired by imagining trees communicating through mycorrhizal networks. Something I want to do next is write a piece inspired by the rhythm of crickets at night. Lately I’m very interested in letting my music feel like it is growing organically, letting the structure and melodies of my recent music often slowly evolve with slight variations.

One of the reasons my music in the past three years has all been in just intonation is that I believe that the infinite variety of microtones one can
draw from the harmonic series better represent the beautiful diversity in nature. Equal temperament, what has become the standard tuning today, is much less resonant and colorful than music that uses exact partials from the harmonic series.

I’m always curious to learn from and connect with scientists and other artists who are inspired by both science and nature.

Judith Modrak,

I am a Washington, D.C. born, New York City based sculptor and installation artist. I am fascinated by what goes on inside and outside of us – from the composition of brain cells, to the intricacies of emotional vulnerability, to the ways in which memories are formed and stored, to the fragility and beauty of the ecosystem we inhabit. My audience participatory installations and free-standing sculptures manifest different aspects of our internal makeup, highlighting the reciprocity between inner impressions and the external world. These two sides, taken together, unmask how our personal and collective experiences develop and evolve in the context of the larger environment.

My art practice is currently most influenced by science and activism, in particular neuroscience (brain cells and neural networks), histology (cells and connective tissue), paleontology (fossils), and environmental activism (climate change). I have become increasingly drawn to create eco-inspired and participatory art works, such as “Endangered Fossils” currently on display in Santa Clarita, CA and “Our Memories”, formerly installed as part of NYC Parks Public Art program.

E. R. Murray (writer, West Cork, Ireland) 

Elizabeth Rose Murray writes novels, non-fiction, short stories and poetry for children, young adults and adults. Her books include Caramel Hearts and the award-winning Nine Lives Trilogy; The Book of Learning (Dublin UNESCO Citywide Read 2016), The Book of Shadows (shortlisted Irish Literacy Association Award & Irish Book Awards), and The Book of Revenge. Recent anthology/journal publications include Mslexia, York Literary Review, Women on Nature, Ponder Review, Paper Lanterns, Reading the Future, Terrain, Not Very Quiet, Elysian: Creative Responses, Autonomy, Popshots, Banshee, and Ropes. 

Elizabeth’s writing is always deeply embedded in themes of place and belonging. From adventure stories to personal essays to nature writing, a key element of her work – both fictional and factual – is how the ‘self’ functions within a given locality, the boundaries presented as a result, and ways to overcome or bend those limitations.

She is also dedicated to exploring the writing and reading process; how we write and why, the ways writing happens off the page, what impacts the themes we write about, and how others respond as a result. Elizabeth has a deep interest in probing the liminal spaces between expectation and possibility; investigating words as private experience, art, and political outlet, while seeking ways to make the written word more accessible for all.

Elizabeth lives in West Cork, Ireland, where she fishes, forages, grows her own veg, and spends as much time as possible adventuring outdoors to fuel her stories.

Ashley Czajkowski, Arizona

The human relationship with nature is a tenuous one. We are at once a part of the natural world, yet intentionally set apart from it. I am interested in this disconnect; our refusal as a species to admit that we, too, are animals. There is a sense of savagery that comes with being an animal, being wild. We have been taught to become something other, to become domesticated. There is loss in this becoming. Though all experience this (false) dichotomy between humans and nature, the accepted social construction of femininity is much further removed from the nature of the human animal.

Historically, women who exhibited wild, uncontrollable, or generally undesirable behavior were considered dangerous and mentally unstable. Witch hunts and medical disorders like hysteria illustrate the collective psychoanalytical fear of the “female monster,” and this chastising of unbecoming female behavior lingers to this day. Because femininity is the gender I learned to perform first-hand, the relationship of women and nature is highlighted in my work, drawing connections to sensuality, fertility and the maternal instinct.

Exploring these intrinsic, wild tendencies deep-seated in us all challenges societal expectations of women and men, our relationship to the natural world, our own corporeal existence, and ultimately, our mortality. I'm interested in how harnessing these innate primal desires presents the possibility of reclamation; of re-wilding the human, of unbecoming.

Isabel Winson-Sagan,
Santa Fe, New Mexico

A lot of my work lately has used the fleeting nature and movement of natural phenomena, such as water. I’m very influenced by the land art of the Southwestern United States, and have done several installation pieces that were designed to degrade. I also use water and ink to print unique abstract art in a process called “suminagashi.”

Ashlee Mays, Teacher's Assistant
Pigeon Forge, TN

As a printmaker, most of the pieces I make derive from some kind of book structure. The structure of a book is simple and its function is intuitive. While books are generally static objects, they are built to be in motion. The spine of a book demonstrates just the right amount of flexibility to allow access. The book form is a vehicle for information, information that was important enough to mechanize and disseminate. Printmaking for me has always been about a mechanism.

It is one thing to say something, it is another thing to write it down, and it is a completely different thing to carve, engrave, design, and print that same thing. My work focuses on these symbols that signify our human desires, and their motion. Their motion through both their mechanization of production, and the way they disseminate into banality. Many of my pieces move from place to place, sometimes through space and sometimes through ownership. Printmaking provides the conceptual spine that supports my interdisciplinary practice. My art pieces are almost always interactive, asking the viewer to physically place themselves in this portrait of connectivity. Nowadays we do not rely on movable type to get us our daily news. It seems that we no longer rely on the accuracy of the artist’s hand to illustrate scientific information. Printmaking mobilized the first information revolution. We are experiencing another one, and this one did not appear out of thin air. I am looking to expose the seemingly invisible lines that connect our day to day experiences with a larger mechanism. It appears to me that Botanists are sometimes doing the same thing. The parking ticket you got last week, the souvenir from your last vacation- these artifacts all have a complex history. They quietly shape an experience that you are actively participating in.

Katie Hart Potapoff, Dundee, Scotland
Teacher's Assistant

Katie Hart Potapoff (She/Her) engages in a non-hierarchical approach through an interdisciplinary practice, working intuitively across processes and mediums such as drawing, installation, creative writing, fibre art, printmaking, metal casting, and clay sculpting. At the centre of her practice research is an exploration of the space in-between. She sees the creative process as an on-going and reciprocal dialogue; a liminal space of possibility to exchange ideas, shift perceptions, an invitation to inhabit a space that remains undefined.

Inspired by ideas of gathering, Potapoff’s recent work with fibre is an exploration into Ursula Le Guin’s essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which borrows from anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher’s theory that the first ‘cultural tool’ was a gathering bag rather than a weapon. The organic fibre forms provide shallow depressions, pockets to hold gathered treasures. Some are empty, simply holding space, others enclose gold-leafed seeds.

Katie is currently completing her practice-led PhD at DJCAD, University of Dundee. She was recently awarded an Explore and Create grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to fund her residency on the Isle of Iona. Her website is www.katiehartpotapoff.com and she is on Instagram @hartofkatie

Anne Mavor, Portland, Oregon

My artwork combines storytelling, research, physical action, imagery, and collaboration to illuminate social, environmental, and personal issues. This has included painting, printmaking, book arts, sculpture, installation, and performance. Using my own life as source material for content, I have explored and contradicted sexism, parent and artist oppression, disability, white supremacy, disconnection from place and home, and illness.

Since 2020 I have been investigating my spiritual, physical, and familial relationship to plants to heal cultural and ancestral disconnection. Using observation, research, and the process of botanical contact printing on reused fabric, I look for connections between me and the plants I find around me in my yard and neighborhood. How can I learn about them, interact with them, collaborate with them, listen to them, and see them intimately? Can I become aware of the inherent bond between me and the landscape?

I am drawn to botanical printing because of the directness and surprise of the process. It reveals hidden colors, shapes, and textures of each plant depending on the season, age, health, type of plant, and individual leaf or flower. I experience the images, sculptures, and installations that emerge from this printing process as beings with characters and messages.

Isabel Winson-Sagan,
Santa Fe, New Mexico

A lot of my work lately has used the fleeting nature and movement of natural phenomena, such as water. I’m very influenced by the land art of the Southwestern United States, and have done several installation pieces that were designed to degrade. I also use water and ink to print unique abstract art in a process called “suminagashi.”

Valérie Chartrand, Winnipeg

I’ve always been fascinated by insects and by what their presence tells us about the world, both from a scientific and a metaphorical perspective. Insects through the ages have been perceived by various cultures as symbols and messengers. Today, the obsvervation of insects as bioindicators also speaks of the state of our ecology.

Primarily a printmaker, many of my prints use dried (found, never killed) insects in soft ground etchings to result in what resembles a fossil. The resulting image preserves the insect and is infused with its symbolism. Process and experimentation are at the core of my practice. I have been exploring encaustics, electroplating and insect prints of many forms including electroetching, cyanotype and photography.

As a first solo exhibition, I created Ghost Hives, a dystopian scenario through which to
contemplate causes and consequences of the disappearance of bees. I worked with bees from collapsed colonies to commemorate their past existence and reflect on their disappearance.

Through exploration, I seek to uncover what the presence and absence of insects today is telling us and how it impacts our environment and our lives.

Mariia Shilnikova, Enonkoski, Finland

As a female ceramic artist working from my home studio in Enonkoski, Finland, I am deeply passionate about the natural world and committed to preserving it for future generations. I find great inspiration in the wild, natural pigments and forests that surround me, and seek to incorporate them into my work in a way that celebrates their beauty and diversity.
Through my use of natural pigments and glazes, I hope to revive an ancient tradition that is both sustainable and environmentally responsible. By sourcing my materials directly from the forests and wild places that inspire me, I am able to create organic shapes and textures that reflect the natural world around us.

In my artistic practice, I am driven by a desire to inspire others to pay closer attention to the world around them, and to care for it in a more meaningful way. I believe that we are all stewards of the environment, and that it is our responsibility to protect and preserve it for future generations. Ultimately, my aim is to create organically shaped ceramic interior objects that are not only beautiful, but also serve as a reminder of the importance of sustainability and conservation.

Through my work, I hope to inspire others to join me in this mission, and to work towards a more sustainable and environmentally responsible future for us all.

Susie Osler, Ontario, Canada

Since 2002 I have inhabited a pocket of land, situated on the unceded traditional Omàmìwininì (Algonquin) territory - that is now commonly known as Lanark County, in eastern Ontario. The gift of this space and my life within it offers me the ability to revel slowly in the natural world and develop a certain intimacy with it. Worlds open up with time spent engaged in looking and sensing. Somewhat mysteriously, the wonder of it all feeds my creative life.

How place and/or ‘the land’ works on us interests me. Margins and verges are rich terrains for the imagination - spaces where control and abandon, the domestic and wild, and the intermingling of culture and nature can be explored. Such tensions can also resonate within an object or a drawing.

I work primarily with clay. Though in recent years, I have also been exploring more 2D work and creating small and large drawings alongside the ceramic work. Clay is both deliciously visceral to work with and technically demanding which can make life as a ceramic artist interesting if not uncertain at times.  I make objects whose purpose may be to interact with, to contemplate, to observe, or to touch.  Pleasure, intimacy, ceremony, reverence and delight are responses I hope to provoke.

I moved to a farm after completing a BFA at The Emily Carr Institute for Art and Design (Vancouver, 1999), followed by a few years as a resident artist at Toronto’s Harbourfront Center. When not working in the studio I can be found gardening, following my chickens around with a camera, trying to play mandolin, writing about plants (Instagram @pineoakyarrow) and hosting events that connect people with the natural world through soulful activity.

Meg Nicks, Alberta

As a visual artist, the intricate details of nature are captivating. Natureʼs flow and rhythms and the interconnectivity of its patterns and design are subjects for art. The mountain environment is my major focus, an apparently solid, but infinitely changeable environment, where life, tough yet fragile, prospers in a severe world. We must look closely to appreciate all that is here. Flowers, mosses, lichen. The black patterns on aspen trees. Salamanders and seeds. Even the rusting of artifacts left behind.

Microscopy brings what is invisible to our attention. This has always interested me. Diatoms, trilobites, the Burgess Shale creatures and views through the microscope. To be able to photograph and have access to what is often unseen or simply unnoticed would be inspirational and assist in building my personal photographic library for use in collage.

Alyssa Ellis, Alberta
Biophilium Expedition Leader

Ellis is an Albertan born artist who has an ongoing love affair with botanical poison. She studies, documents and seeks out poisonous plants that can be found growing naturally within the province of Alberta. Through the process of her work, she studies the relationships between plants and people, and the dependence one has on the other.

“I’m in a constant ongoing, revolving and dissolving love affair with botanical life. We work together, play together and by all means narrate together in order to further develop our complicated relationship. While multidisciplinary in nature, the experimental research of our stories fluctuates between textiles, drawing, performance and installation. Despite always connecting back to the idea of plant storytelling, I strive to do nothing more than to unearth stories that delve into nature’s darker side.”

Bohie Palecek, Braidwood, NSW Australia

Bohie Palecek is inspired by nature at a micro-level and uses the natural world as a metaphor for her personal experiences. Her narrative-driven artworks are inherently innocent, as if seen through the eyes of an empathetic child with a curious nature. They toy with a dichotomy between the safety of home and the wildness beyond; the known and the unknown. As her femininity breaks free of domestication her courage takes her into the motherly arms of the natural world, welcoming her back to the strength and support of her female ancestors. Opposing this connection is an inherently threatening force with malicious intent, the product of a child brought up with off-the-grid parents who retreated from the intrinsically man made threats of Y2K, identity theft, world wars and food shortages. This lack of security creates the yang to the curious child’s yin, often resulting in shadowy themes being presented in misleadingly bright and cheerful colours.

Mirinda Davies, Miami, Australia

Merinda (b.1991) is an artist using performance, movement, installation and conversation to ask how we might reorient ourselves towards deeper care and intimacy. Her work is inspired by the environment, human and more-than-human social and ecological structures and the possibilities available to us in future imaginings. Her practice aims to find clarity and connection in the external world through deep listening, observation, and research into the emotional and physical states in our internal worlds. She grew up in Bundjalung Country, Northern NSW, and is currently living and creating on the land of the Yugambeh language group, in South East QLD. Merinda's solo and collaborative work has most recently been commissioned by; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane & Blue Mountains Cultural Centre (Imprints, 2020/2021), Outerspace (Umwelt Collective: m0ther.online, 2020), The Walls (Take your pleasure seriously, 2020, MIAMI/MIAMI international residency), Placemakers* GC (Fully Automated Human Touch, 2020) and City of Gold Coast (Conversations with the Forest, ongoing).

The work she is currently deeply embedded in is ‘Conversations with the Forest’ which is a living, breathing and growing artwork unfurling over time for future generations. This project explores interspecies communications and how we might create a world where plants are our equals.

Desiree Nault, Calgary, Alberta

Before the pandemic I made art to wrestle with, very broadly, hegemony. The domination of a diverse society by a ruling class that makes everyone a participant of the dominant ideology until it is perceived as natural or inevitable. How, contemporaneously, people who perceive themselves as individuals with agency inevitably keep reproducing the dominate culture, what was once enforced is not now self-perpetuated. As an example, in a previous work, I organized a group of rec league players and artists to re-enact two NHL hockey fights in order to understand our bodily interactions with Hegemony through the microcosm of organized sports. This project helped us examine what we already know, that all of our comradery, love, and the meaning of our lives is found at the location of arbitrary power and violence. I felt that, in the process of reconstructing these systems one might discover the secrets to emancipation.

After a year in the pandemic, accepting and negotiating state authority everyday, I can see that I will not find solutions in re-enacting what I consider to be problems. While these are still the central themes of my practice, going forward I want to turn to the solutions I think (and science, especially the field of epigenetics can back up) lie in all humans, animal, and plant bodies, in the capacities of their genetics, muscles, bones, and nervous systems to carry meaning, communicate, and harmonize in the present moment and across time.

Joanna Grace, Portland, Oregon

Through my paintings I illuminate and expand the small world I see under the microscope. Studying botany and digging deeper into the world of science has inspired a recognition in the parallels of shapes and colors that exist between the microscopic and macroscopic worlds. I choose to work mainly with oil paints to engage bright colors and varying textures that capture images we will never be able to see without the help of a secondary tool. As I am studying the microscopic points of botany, I begin to see the patterns in fluidity and life processes that extend through the space of overall existence: circular layers, no true empty space, movement that can make a solitary object look like it is bleeding into the air or existing at more than one point in that moment. I strive to enlarge the tiny world into images that encapsulate the constant natural chaos and symbiotic relationships that keep our senses attuned and our bodies breathing.

Felicity Cocuzzoli, Medowie NSW Australia

I am a woman, mother, grandmother, a proud descendent of the Wiradjuri nation in NSW, Australia. I am also an artist/practitioner/researcher, committed to promoting human flourishing through the arts. At eight years old, my first experience of flight bore me to my father’s posting in south-east Asia. Here, a tacit understanding that my sense of belonging was entwined to relationships beyond physical and human space surfaced. I did not yet know that my father’s Aboriginality was invisibilised by politics of assimilation and denial, that his family’s safety and acceptance rested securely in their recognised northern Irish-ness. In reclaiming my relationship with these silenced narratives, my adult self recognises that the deepest roots of my belonging resonate as embodied connections to knowing and being in ways that are perplexing and profound.

Coming to trust in ever-present ‘gut’ feelings as deep ways of knowing. Feeling the presence of evanescent and natural beings and understanding that messages can be carried by other-than-human forms.

It is through art-making that I intuitively claim my heritage and speak phenomenologically to fascination of human diversity and my connection to country. As an artist, I am increasingly compelled to illuminate the sensation/al and to give voice to our other-than-human connectedness.

Amanda Besl, Buffalo, NY

I am interested in the arbitrary curation of gardening and the warfare that ensues from these choices. Frothing bubbles fade to reveal porcelain rose petals macerated and mangled by the bejeweled and ethereal bobbing corpses of drowning Japanese beetles. They tread water in the murky deathtrap of a liquid measuring cup, suggested by the round panel of the oil painting that straddles simultaneous attraction and repulsion, hyperrealism and abstraction. This duality causes both rational and irrational distinctions and subconscious prejudices to bob to the surface of our awareness. Beautiful and repulsive they exist together for a liminal time, a slow read that can’t be unread.

My process began while tending my own garden and escorting these beautiful marauders to their soapy tomb. This work is a departure from early work exploring botanical debris visible through the translucent ‘skin’ of plastic yard waste bags. I liken these paintings to America’s current turbulent political climate, in which distinctions become lost in confusion and distortion.

2019

Field Expeditions

Michelle Bunton, Expedition Leader
Ontario, Canada

Rooted in a space of paradox, my practice attempts to question the mnemonic capacity of technology as an archival medium, dismantling the notion of the video or sound record as an absolute or concrete preservation of the body/psyche. Creating multi-media, sculptural installations, my work aims to mirror a high-intensity atmosphere in which technological, human, and material bodies compete and grate against one another in a perseverance towards preservation. My practice is further influenced by a critical interest in neutrality, passivity and Quantum Theory’s concept of “potentia,” which is defined as an intermediary layer of reality that exists halfway between the physical reality of matter and the intellectual reality of the image. I consider technology-based archives to occupy this intermediate reality, offering a critical venue through which to examine larger themes, such as gender, sexuality, death and decay.

Annie Dunning, Guelph, Ontario

Our relationship with nature is messy. I feel an affinity to Donna Haraway’s ideas of Staying with the Trouble (2016, Duke University Press). My work does not offer answers for how we should interact with other creatures in this compromised environment; instead, I try to expand areas of commonality through observations and small discoveries that can, through lateral thinking, indicate a mutual effect of one upon another. I would like to position human and more-thanhuman relationships as adaptive collaborations: developing on a parallel course and mutually influencing the developments of one another. It is clear that we have an impact on the species around us, how in turn are we affected by them?

In my work, I examine intersecting elements of culture and the so-called natural world, conflated to create new, hybrid ideas. Through my multidisciplinary practice, I explore what greater possibilities flora, fauna and fungi might hold if released from their expected roles. I find the grey areas between the human world and the cultures of other species to be fascinating spaces for speculation. Using a project-based approach to making, I confuse conventional hierarchies by playing with the interconnections and interactions between humans and the rest of the natural world. Over the past ten years, sound has become an integral component of my work.

Tara Dougans, Montreal

I am a Montréal-based artist whose work explores inner and outer reflections of the natural world; my intention is to cultivate sensitivity and space within the body in order to attune more fully to waking experience. Understanding the body as instrument, and experience as harmonic, I am fascinated by soundscape ecology (the relationship between emotional intelligence and environmental intelligence) and the pre or paraverbal. What is the experience (space remembered) of the space between, before, words? How can working with voice, breath and silence reflect and/or spark hidden relationships between what we see and what we know? And how does that intuitive sense of knowing inform what and how we see ?

The interplay between my painting and moving-image work is an exercise towards listening to, performing, recording and/or translating unseen (unheard) soundscapes through self-intuited process. Self-taught as a filmmaker and oriented towards the immediacy of hand-based media, resonance communication, deep listening, high sensory registration and enquiry into the unseen but somehow, somewhere known, guide process and response.

Kelly Markovich, Dartmouth, NS

Kelly Markovich is an interdisciplinary artist, interested in photography, sound, textiles, installation and mixed media.

Using memory and storytelling as a catalyst, personal or shared, much of Kelly’s work has predominantly focused on large-scale photographic images printed and displayed on unconventional materials like Tyvek (a breathable, membranous material used in the house building process). Slightly skewed and altered, various means are used to disrupt the convention of “what we know” by way of digital manipulation, stitching, suturing, and playing with scale, weight, and the arrangement of common domestic objects. The objects are presented within a space creating tension, which serves to represent that which is familiar, yet simultaneously strange and unfamiliar or “unheimlich”.

Thematically, Kelly’s work depicts relationships, story, and shared memory as it relates to loss, permanence, presence, and absence. Kelly is interested in collective memory and trauma, and the act of healing through the sharing of oral traditions. More recently she has begun to honour the domestic cultural skills that were passed down from the Serbian matriarch of her family lineage and invite hand needlework such as embroidery, petit point, and knitting into her art practice. Rooted in research and steeped in tradition, this process showcases the fleetingness of life and the importance of story on our own identities and histories.

Ashlee Mays, Pigeon Forge, TN

As a printmaker, most of the pieces I make derive from some kind of book structure. The structure of a book is simple and its function is intuitive. While books are generally static objects, they are built to be in motion. The spine of a book demonstrates just the right amount of flexibility to allow access. The book form is a vehicle for information, information that was important enough to mechanize and disseminate. Printmaking for me has always been about a mechanism.

It is one thing to say something, it is another thing to write it down, and it is a completely different thing to carve, engrave, design, and print that same thing. My work focuses on these symbols that signify our human desires, and their motion. Their motion through both their mechanization of production, and the way they disseminate into banality. Many of my pieces move from place to place, sometimes through space and sometimes through ownership. Printmaking provides the conceptual spine that supports my interdisciplinary practice. My art pieces are almost always interactive, asking the viewer to physically place themselves in this portrait of connectivity. Nowadays we do not rely on movable type to get us our daily news. It seems that we no longer rely on the accuracy of the artist’s hand to illustrate scientific information. Printmaking mobilized the first information revolution. We are experiencing another one, and this one did not appear out of thin air. I am looking to expose the seemingly invisible lines that connect our day to day experiences with a larger mechanism. It appears to me that Botanists are sometimes doing the same thing. The parking ticket you got last week, the souvenir from your last vacation- these artifacts all have a complex history. They quietly shape an experience that you are actively participating in.

Dominika Ksel, Brooklyn

I’m an interdisciplinary artist, activist, educator, psychonaut and investigator of invisible landscapes. My works are an ecosystem that gently deconstruct power and materiality, while exploring the interstices of consciousness, myth, science and feminism. These information networks are presented as video installations, interactive sculptures and paintings, and sound-based performances providing a tangible glimpse of various invisible phenomena, and illuminating how these imperceptible structures influence the human condition and our larger quantum reality. 

As a trained hypnotist, media researcher and archivist, I use primary research, tests, interviews and analysis to form playful and peculiar experiences, physical objects and psychoacoustic compositions. 

Through the methodology of psychonautics, I describe and explore the subjective effects of altered states of consciousness through modes such as sensory deprivation, hypnosis, meditation, sound and breath entrainment. Thus creating access and mapping information often missed due to the technologically overactive and chaotic contemporary existence drowned out by the anthrophony.

Within the systems of visual and audio works, I subvert symbols of violence and disparity through a sci-fi lens and psycho-physical language, unpacking and searching for a way to heal and explore traumas caused by a capitalist framework that has encouraged white supremacy, patriarchy, dehumanization and ecocide.

Clara Laratta, Hamilton, ON

My work explores how our experience with nature influences the way we see and interact with the world. It deals with issues of identity and is an exploration into understanding the way people behave. I find that no matter how often I stray from nature, it always enters into some aspect of my work. I am constantly questioning what it means to be human, how our experiences shape who we are and the way we see the world. Examination of these matters help me understand why people behave the way they do and how life circumstances and our experiences change us, allowing us to grow or wither. Positive impacts from human interactions with nature is of great interest.

Images are created through the execution of photographic self-portraits, images that explore subtle changes in the perception and portrayal of self. They reflect the impact of day to day experiences and interactions with others and our natural environment.     The works are based on an intimate look at self while holding a space for a look at “others” in a broader context.  Manual layering of physical properties being photographed allow many facets of research to come together in one image. 

The use of self-portraits in my work is serendipitous to someone who has an aversion to being photographed. As a female, the control and ability to represent myself as the subject rather than an object is appealing to me.  No matter what the intervention, similar to nature when it is unleashed, control is lost.  The history of photography, its ties to the history of portraiture and the new genre of selfies is also of interest and provides an opportunity for dialogue with a wide audience.  The way we live our life has meaning. The way we interact with one another and the environment leaves an impact whether we are aware of it or not. The way we interpret the world provides interest in our experience, an opportunity for discussion, and enables us each to have a unique connection to one another and our community.

2018

Field expeditions

Luba Diduch, Alberta

My research is based in collaborative and participatory projects that explore the ways in which forests can be used as creatively productive spaces. My current project titled Sounds of the Biome is composed of field recordings captured in forested environments in Alberta. My purpose in making these recordings is to transform them within audio compositions, and to raise awareness regarding Canadian forests’ beauty and vulnerability. I am interested in enacting creative practices – such as audio recording the natural environments around trees – and linking them to other forested regions in Canada.

Linda Duvall, Saskatoon

I am a Saskatoon-based artist whose work exists at the intersection of collaboration, performance and conversation. My hybrid practice addresses recurring themes of connection to place, grief and loss, and the many meanings of exclusion and absence.

In the summer of 2017 I completed a project in which I spent 65 days in a 6-foot deep hole in rural Saskatchewan with 45 different individuals from various parts of the world. Each person spent 6 hours a day in the hole with me, considering the hole within various frameworks including scientific, geologic, biological, historical, or others. We read out loud, hummed to the walls, talked, observed the birds, shared stories, were silent and often all of the above. Many of these activities involved intense listening – to the subtle sounds of baby bank swallows in their nests, the falling grains of sand, the wind under various conditions. We had only lapel mics that we used in various ways to either isolate sounds or create mini-symphonies of the merging of sand and wind etc.

Terry Billings, Saskatoon

In my audio, video and installation work, I raise questions that challenge us to consider the perspectives of a different kind of body, of different modes of vision, and how variant means of moving though space and time might affect non-human consciousness, experience and perception. This work anticipates a deepening engagement with the biological other from which we are so dangerously estranged.

Gathering imagery, sound and materials during walks in my environment informs my overall approach. I am interested in how a present, subjective experience of a place and its creatures and plants on an intimate scale is influenced by and contradicts the more dominant modern values of consumption and development; how caring for a place and its inhabitants changes its perception and inherent value.

Working more poetically than discursively, I investigate different visual and narrative structures as a way of proposing embodied knowledge, alternate umwelten or sensoria - how beings perceive and interpret their environment - and the inherent possibilities for other-creaturely consciousness within these. Because translation through technology is an important aspect of these proposals, scientific method becomes a part of the poetic of the work, subsumed into a more ambivalent rigor.

Fundamentally, I am a community builder. Growing up on my great-grandfather’s farm and steeped in the culture of close-knit rural Eastern Ontario, I gained an appreciation for two rudimentary social customs: the chinwag and the get-together. Knowing what constitutes an effective chinwag (chat, discussion, conversation, dialogue, debate) and a successful get-together (blind date, party, concert, meeting, rehearsal) has been central to every endeavour I have ever undertaken, large or small.

My day-to-day mission is simple: to advance, in the chinwag department, from “small talk” to “big talk” as quickly as possible—thereby laying the groundwork for stimulating get-togethers and, over time, a robust culture and community.

I have observed that both music and food represent uniquely potent catalysts for creating a sense of togetherness among people. My work as a keyboard specialist (piano, organ, synthesizer, accordion) provides me an ever-fascinating means by which to accomplish my aim of cultivating togetherness—often without words. The same can be said for sharing in the making and eating of food. My background and lifelong interest in agriculture, which I view as an extension of ecology, reflects this impulse. I am an amateur seed saver, an aspiring local grower, and a passionate breakfast host.

Coco Collins of Construction & Destruction
Nova Scotia

As Construction & Destruction, we strive through our work to plumb personal narratives, celestial noise, sentience, flora and fauna, the animal other, external politics, internal geographies, f-bombs, weather bombs, immediacy and temporality, edicts and edifices, thresholds, tongues, lizard brains, loves, gestures, marginalia, negative and no- space…
We have each made long-running informal studies of animals and the science of sound, and continue to do so from our rural vantage.  We are interested both in the pragmatics and the philosophies inherent to rhythm-based communication and sound.  Sympathetic resonance, as actuality and metaphor, is something we pursue in all of our endeavors.  Including work we’ve done with music and people who have autism, music and survivors of abuse, music and the elderly, and music and teens in schools.

We’re very interested in an opportunity to further our studies of sound and communication and to commune with other like-minded individuals.  We’re intrigued by both new and ancient approaches to sound and the biosphere and are open to learning and watching and gathering information and experiences.  We relish any opportunity to chat gear, eco-phenomenology, feedback, animals, and to work towards the creation of another album.

Cimarron Knight, Vancouver

I am a conceptual artist currently working within the mediums of installation, assemblage and the written word. Within my artistic practice, I have been questioning memory and how it influences narrative: personal and societal. How are these stories influenced by our intellectual reasoning, our body memory and our cultural conditioning? How do these perceived truths inform who we are and what we contribute as individuals and a society?

As a contemporary western female, I have been looking not only at my own cultural and gender mythologies, but beginning to explore other perspectives including nature. What I have been discovering is these collective and individual narratives greatly influence our environments: through our politics, our relationships to ourselves and each other, our planet, and how we present ourselves in a cyber-world. As an artist and writer, I have been asking myself how can messages be sent and received in a complex world of oversaturation?

Linelle Stepto, Australia

‘All things have the capacity for speech - all beings have the ability to communicate something of themselves to other beings.’

My area of exploration has always focussed on the animal/human interface.
If we can shift the thinking around our position in the world to question the old pyramidal structure that positions humans at the top, then we may be able to locate a less destructive and more sustainable way of being in the world. 

My practice attempts to reimagine the way we can live in the world, by perceiving the world of the Other. Sound is just one of the sensory pathways into that expanded perception; it is a maker of meaning. 

In work to date, enquiry into the manner in which other animals express their lives, sound becomes de-territorialised, removed from its usual context in an attempt to disrupt the anthropocentric encounter with the world. 

Abram, David. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. Vintage Books, Random House Inc, New York p172

Natasha Lushetich, Singapore

I am an artist and theorist. Combining performance, video fragments, sitespecific installations and choreographies, I explore the poetics and politics of relationality, embodiment, and the status of sensory experience in cultural knowledge. Sceptical of historiographic models of accounting for past events, discipline-specific knowledge machines, and cultural hegemonies – those invisible articulations of experience that make up lived systems of meaning – I look to liminal practices, discarded spaces, eclectic imponderabilia, and palimpsest-like mediations of information. My purpose in assembling and disassembling patterns, situations, materials, and conceptual ingredients, is to articulate the indeterminacy of coherence and disparity, multiple perceptual velocities, incompatible scales of magnitude, and idiosyncrasy.

My theoretical work focuses on intermedia; aesthetics as ethics; the theories of time and the event; art as philosophy; the production of space; and biopolitics and performativity. An important part of my recent research is also strategic ignorance, agnotology, and the production of what Bernard Stiegler has called ‘systemic stupidity’ (Stiegler 2010). 

The focus of this project is inter-species poetics of space and embodiment, environmental-existential refrains (Guatarri) and their pertaining mnemonic processes (the assumption here is that memory, like knowledge, is environmentally embedded). This includes acoustics, kinaesthetics, spatial perception, and proprioception. I would like to give a talk on (multi-sensorial) interspecies memory.

Elizabeth Chitty, Ontario

I make primarily video and sound installations and performances, as  well  as  video,  artist’s  gardens  and  constructed  photographs.  I have worked with community-­‐based strategies  and  within  walking  practice.  My current work  is  place-­‐based  and  focuses  on  a  site’s  geology,  plants  and  birds,  natural  and  built  landscapes,  governance  including  treaties,  histories,  and  water  and  its  infrastructure.  

Although  audio  has  almost  always  been  part  of  my  work,  my  engagement  with  audio  changed  in  2016  with  a  self-­‐directed  residency  at  Warblers’  Roost  near  South  River  ON.  Having  worked  with  sound  artist  Darren  Copeland  many  times  in  the past,  last  June  I  went  to  Warblers’  Roost  under  his  mentorship  to  learn  to  edit  my  own  sound  material  with  REAPER  DAW.  I  also  improved  the  basic  recording  skills  I  first  learned  some  years  previously  with  New  Adventures  in  Sound  Art.  This  has  significantly  impacted  my  practice.  

My  work  is  research-­‐based  and  always  self-­‐directed.  I  would  very  much  benefit  from  working  in  an  environment  of  experts  and  other  artists.  Any  one  of  the  3  residencies  would  provide  me  with  an  opportunity  to  develop  skills,  explore  new  ways  of  working,  and  immerse  myself  in  work  away  from  my  usual  environment.  

Spring 2016

Field expeditions

Michael McDermott, Philidelphia

 My sound art practice sits at the nexus between present moment awareness, deep time and humanity’s personal connection through listening. I have created works for video, dance, stage, installation, smart phones, multi-speaker arrays, wind sculptures, wishing wells and deep sleep. My work integrates a daily practice of meditation, Deep Listening and textured sound worlds through a process called “sonic photography”. This process involves site specific recordings of physical spaces re-imagined using photographic development and collage techniques. My aim is to re-frame the everyday world as both a grand statement that stretches out in both directions of time and as an ephemeral instant of precious connection. I have a special recent interest in presenting, preserving and contextualizing ecological sound environments. I'm currently working on a project of re-imagined voices of extinct animals using altered sounds of living animals and synthesized sounds. 

Nadya Eidelstein, Toronto

I am a multi-disciplinary artist, designer and programmer. Initially, I started my studies as a jewellery designer but the interest in technology and different kinds of media brought me to extend my area of exploration and research into the field of new media. Currently I am working and experimenting with a variety of media and techniques, combining together digital and hand skills to create the hybrids and creatures that reflect my understanding of the current digital age. I am swimming in the huge ocean of new media in search of new ways of seeing and creating and I am widely open for new ideas and collaborations.