Alexis Williams, Ottawa, Ontario
Director of the Biophilium

Alexis is an everyday wildlife photographer seldom seen without her long lens slung over her shoulder. The camera acts as a touch stone to maintain focus and ensures every effort to observe ambient wildlife or as a stand in for a foraging basket. She has been photographing birds obsessively since 2020, previously, her wild mushroom photography obsession spanned over a decade.

Making daily lists of bird sightings keeps her happy and connected to seasonal nuances. Seeking out new birds to photograph and draw takes her to wild places around the world. She is deeply interested in bird behaviour and communication, especially inter-species interactions.

She is currently in Mexico working on bringing her life list up from 500 to 600 species.

Ashlee Mays, Pigeon Forge, TN
Biophilium Research Leader
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.

Renée Magaña, Kallnach, Switzerland

My artistic practice unfolds over more than two decades of practice. My work has evolved through multiple mediums, from individual paintings on canvas, to series and, more recently to objects and dioramas.. I intertwine different thematic thoughts, allowing associations to accumulate, overlap, and transform. My work exists within a portal between memory, farewell, and transformation, where art becomes a threshold and a language for what remains. At its core, my work explores death and transformation. I have collected hundreds of overlooked, abandoned, and discarded objects, focusing on the silent narratives embedded within them. As I form them into art, these remnants are honored as witnesses and carriers of mortality, nostalgia, and persistence.

I live and work in an old parsonage built in 1621. Here, my daily life and artistic practice are inseparable. Life and death coexist without opposition. In my garden, I cultivate wild and medicinal plants used in my grief counselling practice. These, in turn, feed the countless critters within. In time, they die, and I forage their bodies and bones to use in my work, not as symbols of decay, but as agents of continuity.

Within my underlying engagement with death, birds recur. Across cultures, birds accompany the dead between worlds. In Mexican cosmology, owls and crows stand beside Mictecacihuatl, the goddess of the underworld Mictlán. Recently, I have become the godmother to a tawny owl, carrying this lineage beyond symbol and into life.

Nature has been a lifelong source of artistic inspiration for me. More than 20 years ago I cut my teeth as an artist working for a theatre company in an urban park, and my life has never been the same. I have created a lot of work intended to be presented outdoors; including plays, art installations, processions, dance events, giant puppets, workshops and concerts, all en plein air. In 2010 I moved to a rural community, and wilderness is a constant presence and source of wonder in my life (just this morning I pulled over to the side of the road to watch otters playing on a frozen creek).

Animals feature prominently in my artwork, and I try to use imagery of fauna local to my area wherever possible. As I create a lot of community-based art it is important for me to create work that is specific to the place I live. I frequently collaborate with naturalists, biologists, geologists and more to help better understand the world around me. Some of my favourite creatures are the most modest; pigeons, squirrels and snails are all recurring characters in my body of work. I use my art to celebrate our natural world, ultimately hoping to inspire others and promote conservation.

Maryse Goudreau,

Drawing on her experience with the world of nature, Maryse Goudreau creates universes that accompany us as we grapple with unprecedented environmental issues. Her work sometimes takes the form of books, playwriting or cinematographic narratives, and more often in visual art exhibitions that emerge from conversations, shared experiences with various scientific actors or artistic complicities. Her work is a hybrid of photography, video essays, sculpture, immersive devices, action art and social art, with several participatory projects, including Manifestation pour la mémoire des quais and Festival du tank d'Escuminac - first and last editions.

Since 2012, she has been creating an archive dedicated to the beluga whale, which she hopes to complete over twenty years. She sees it as an open work for which she assembles multiple data and creations. Although the beluga whale is emblematic for her, her current projects also touch on other subjects that also widen the circle of ecological compassion.

Franci Duran,

My artwork looks at history, memory and violence through the aperture of the archive: assembled and accidental. I create films, video installation, and 2D, photo-based, mixed-media works. Born in Santiago, Chile in 1967, I came to Canada as a refugee following the 1973 military coup that ousted elected president Salvador Allende. This event – the experience of exile and its reckoning – is integral to my artistic practice.

I am interested in traces and lost, irretrievable things. I take images and audio apart, and reassemble them to reveal the tactile qualities of media that are often thought of as ephemeral. Using a variety of digital and analogue media, processes and methodologies — photographs, film and digital video, hand drawing and digital illustration, analogue and digital found footage, downloaded images, texts and type, animation — I seek to make visible, to give a graphical representation and physicality to what is usually perceived as invisible and intangible, for instance, light, sound and memory. I strive to locate and follow circuitous paths produced by the intersections of the body, language and translation, popular culture, new technologies, old technologies, lost and abandoned technologies, humans and other-than-humans, archival films and recordings, personal stories, news stories, historical documents, politics, and works of art.

I am interested in the acts of looking and documenting and in the results, both pleasurable and painful. These formal and material experimentations act as metaphor for memory.

Adele Medina O'Dowd

My ceramics reflect a personal exploration of particles, molecules, organisms, and natural forces, how they interact and emerge in liminal space, and what physics, chemistry, ecology and biology reveals to us about the universe. I am astonished that even while we are immersed within it, the way the universe functions is nearly invisible to our senses and perception. Discussing this with others is mindblowing and joyful. We grasp it better with observation and contemplation—something I do, perhaps excessively. I’d like to live in a universe where scientific conversation is normal and fluent. We can do that.

Making vessels that are chemically transformed in an atmospheric wood fired kiln is the perfect medium for me to grapple with the scientific concepts I want to comprehend and with which to express my wonder. I hope others will use and interact with these artworks in their lives with family and friends, touching them, and be prompted to consider all kinds of metamorphoses, systems and relationships, even if only fleetingly.

Going forward I want to expand my practice with clay to incorporate multimedia, other natural materials like fiber, feathers, stone and light with weaving, printing, and 3D construction to build on concepts of scale, time and transformation.

Deana Bada Malony, Chicago, Illinois

Deana Bada Maloney is a multi-medium versed artist and past scientific illustrator who uses ceramic sculpture as the main vehicle to explore the magic and mystery of the natural world. Her work is a deep study of living forms, celebrating the inherent structure of the subject while emphasizing its transcendental presence.

A trained scientific illustrator, Deana graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1990s. Her strong drawing roots are evident in her current ceramic work, where she utilizes a final oxide firing method to capture every mark, giving her sculptures the appearance of 3D drawings. Inspiration for her pieces is drawn from myths, stories, and cultural beliefs concerning the relationship between animals and nature. Her sculptures often tell a story, reflecting a higher conscience or spiritual presence.

A constant theme running through her work is the visual accountability of “the nature we create.” By incorporating found materials and symbolism, she addresses how animals are adapting to the modern world's waste and pollution. Her pieces offer a blend of humor and sadness, inviting viewers to engage with and take accountability for their individual role in this evolving creation.

Daniella Napolitano, Phoenix, AZ

My work is a call to action for people to notice their animal neighbors and take the time to understand or appreciate them. The animals I depict are often overlooked, misidentified, or misunderstood. By highlighting “ordinary,” urban animals in my work, I remind the viewer that humans share a space with wildlife. I believe the first step to caring about something is knowing it exists. It is generally hard for people to think in abstract concepts but if you can point out an animal, call it by its name, and pass on information about it, then maybe steps will be taken to understand it better. I personally take simple pleasure in sharing moments with the animals I encounter every day, but it is an impossible task to try to get everyone to love every animal. However, I can hope to help people recognize an animal’s place in our shared ecosystem.

In his book Moonwalking with Einstein, Joshua Foer interviews memory grandmaster Ed Cooke who states, “The general idea… is to change whatever boring thing is being inputted into your memory into something so colorful, so exciting, and so different from anything you’ve seen before that you can’t possibly forget it.” I take inspiration from stories of encounters with animals that are so often associated with the city, they have been rendered invisible at best, a nuisance at worst. I often exaggerate, or add fantastical elements, or humor to these stories as an attempt to be more indelible and endearing to the viewer. Many of these “animal stories” are my own experiences and others have been collected from friends, acquaintances, and even internet forums. In this way, the stories are not only amusing but also relatable—almost everyone has an animal story.

Printmaking’s history is connected to the spread of mass communication and as such, plays an important role in the concept of my work. I am inspired by biologists and science communicators who make complex information more accessible to the public. My earliest influences have been children’s nature books that distill knowledge in a way that is fun for the reader and therefore more memorable. I now look to field guides for the same reason, likening my creative practice to that of a natural historian informed by ecology, biology, and natural history research. I observe animals and plants, translating the information I learn into a “popular” rather than “scientific” form; visual narratives that incorporate observation-based information with a whimsical approach to animal behavior.

Famed natural historian Sir David Attenborough said, “An understanding of the natural world and what’s in it is a source of not only a great curiosity but great fulfilment.” It is my wish that my work will motivate viewers to notice the animals around them and attempt to understand them better. If we begin to see urban wildlife as a part

Monika Kinner,
Saskatoon / Jackfish Lake (both in Treaty Six Territory)

Wenhui Lim, Singapore

I am Wenhui, a Singaporean artist working as niceaunties. After nineteen years in architecture, I left practice to build the Auntieverse, a speculative, evolving world centred on the figure of the "auntie," a character often comic, underestimated or dismissed, who became my protagonist.

What began in 2023 as an exploration of AI tools developed into a sustained inquiry into ageing, gender, domestic labour, cultural identity and environmental consciousness. Through AI-generated video, installation, inflatable structures, silicone sculpture and interactive mirrors, I investigate how the identities of ageing women are shaped by expectation, repetition and care work, and how identity can be both eroded and reclaimed. The auntie's "love language," constant commentary, practical advice, blunt critique, becomes a device to surface internalised self-judgement. I examine beauty not as aspiration but as pressure. What appears humorous often reveals a deeper system of self-surveillance.

In 2024, during a residency at Pueblo Garzón Campos in Uruguay, I made Aunties in Dis Place, exploring displacement, migration and the freedom to belong. That work confirmed my desire to ground the Auntieverse in living systems. The questions I already ask, who is allowed beauty, how does care become control, what does it mean to move freely, have deep parallels in the biological world. I want to learn these systems rigorously so they reshape my work, not serve as loose metaphor.

Shaleem Ahmed, Manchester, UK

Im Shaleem Ahmed, a self-taught creator, based in Manchester, curious about seeds, rough paintings and processes lurking beneath the immediate or visible experience. For several years, I’ve been interested in translating ideas into creative expression and output, with a current interest in painting and horticultural-based work. I often paint in my allotment and garden in my studio. My current research obsession lies in grass and organic materials grown or foraged in the local environment, specifically looking at the material possibilities found in plant roots (see instagram for examples of my root work, informally called ‘Grist for the Mill’ an ancient English agricultural proverb generally meaning ‘all is useful’)

Another evolving area of interest is in the space between the seen and the unseen - the interstitial space that charges polar opposites; supplemented by readings Taoism and of Lao Tzu. I like to follow my curiosity wherever it leads, which allows me to constantly learn new methods and media. I enjoy selecting whichever medium best expresses my most urgent interests at any given moment. This has resulted in a mixed body of work: from Olives in the Sky, a five-hour, two-part mix illustrating the depth of Asian music history, to Phwooooo!, a creative fermentation project aiming to complete a full farm-to-table process for a homemade chilli sauce, which in my eyes, unironically succeeded in its failure. And in addition to this learning wood working and sculpture using foraged timber and felled logs on our allotment farm site; all inspired by a two week walk around the coastal path of Cornwall and Barbara Hepworth. 

I value my non-academic arts background and personal approach because it allows ideas to cross-pollinate and form new emergences; engaging in curiosity, openness and learning by doing. A recent example of this is the creative workshops I am trying to do more often in my local community of Levenshulme, looking to engage the higher than average proportion of Global Majority residents who are typically underserved culturally by formal arts institutions

Kayla-Jane Barrie, Ontario, Canada

Kayla-Jane, based in Ontario, Canada, explores nature and the human experience through poetic expression in her abstract and mixed-media artworks. Guiding viewers through life’s complexities, she draws them into landscapes of poetic abstraction, capturing beauty in layers of mixed media. Through her art, Kayla-Jane is an explorer of the soul, the mysteries of creation, and the courage it takes to venture into the unknown. Her journey guides her and her viewers toward asking questions and pausing in the awe of the present moment. You can find her work in Eccentric Orbits, The Fulcrum Review, Dwarf Stars, and Consilience.

Lucy Rupert, Toronto, Canada
Biophlium Research Leader

My inspirations and artistic process as dance artist are deeply coloured by my naturalist parents: raising butterflies in our bathroom, rehabilitating hawks and owls in our garage, collecting samples of rare wildflower species.  I always have an eye on the relationship between humankind and nature.  Where does animal instinct meet the poetry of art and science? What can we discover by looking at it  through this prism?

The birth of my son has motivated me to find deeper roots for my art: how can it move through my community in a way that is visible, positive, engaging and inspiring for anyone? This is manifesting now in ideas clustered around physics, ecology and cosmology. How poetic naturalism (the natural laws and philosophies or stories we tell about them) translates into a visceral moving beast, how dance performance can cause all participants to resist cynicism, to consider and care more.

I am so inspired by the gorgeousness of human accomplishments. We are capable of such cleverness and ingenuity, surely we can solve and heal where we’ve damaged and neglected. I want to be part of that process, connecting ideas, sensations, filtering it through dynamic, imaginative bodies to offer some thought-provoking spark.

I don’t know if I’m doing that, yet, but I’m trying. After 20 years of making and dancing, there is so much more to learn.

Wenhui Lim, Singapore

I am Wenhui, a Singaporean artist working as niceaunties. After nineteen years in architecture, I left practice to build the Auntieverse, a speculative, evolving world centred on the figure of the "auntie," a character often comic, underestimated or dismissed, who became my protagonist.

What began in 2023 as an exploration of AI tools developed into a sustained inquiry into ageing, gender, domestic labour, cultural identity and environmental consciousness. Through AI-generated video, installation, inflatable structures, silicone sculpture and interactive mirrors, I investigate how the identities of ageing women are shaped by expectation, repetition and care work, and how identity can be both eroded and reclaimed. The auntie's "love language," constant commentary, practical advice, blunt critique, becomes a device to surface internalised self-judgement. I examine beauty not as aspiration but as pressure. What appears humorous often reveals a deeper system of self-surveillance.

In 2024, during a residency at Pueblo Garzón Campos in Uruguay, I made Aunties in Dis Place, exploring displacement, migration and the freedom to belong. That work confirmed my desire to ground the Auntieverse in living systems. The questions I already ask, who is allowed beauty, how does care become control, what does it mean to move freely, have deep parallels in the biological world. I want to learn these systems rigorously so they reshape my work, not serve as loose metaphor.

Klaire Doyle, Manchester, United Kingdom

Klaire Doyle is a conceptual artist from Northern England whose practice explores lived experience, abjection, and womanhood through interdisciplinary approaches spanning visual art, film, scenography, and performance.

Rooted in vulnerability and driven by curiosity, her work examines personal and collective narratives as a way of understanding the world around her. Through documenting and reimagining everyday phenomena, Klaire constructs enigmatic representations of memory and history. Her practice is deeply connected to storytelling, using fragmented narratives and shifting perspectives to challenge conventional ways of seeing and experiencing the world.
Her works have been nationally and internationally exhibited since 2014, including solo and group shows in New York City, Venice Architecture Biennale, Moscow, Tokyo, Helsinki, Melbourne and TATE Exchange.

Ontological Praxis (Eve Walton), Rockville, MD USA

My work is driven by close observation of movement, navigation, and constraint across materials and living systems. I am interested in how motion becomes legible when it is attended to carefully - through drawing, recording, and simple experimental setups that allow patterns to emerge without forcing interpretation.

Recent projects include studies of plant morphology, fluid flow, and small-scale field observations of insect locomotion. These investigations are translated into visual and auditory artifacts such as drawings, paintings, and sound recordings, treating movement itself as both subject and material. Rather than producing representations, I aim to make traces - paths, flows, and signals that register how organisms and materials respond to their environments.

My practice is informed by training in biology and by ongoing engagement with scientific literature, but it is not illustrative of science. Instead, it operates in the space between observation and abstraction, where attention, constraint, and method shape what can be perceived. I am particularly interested in work that sits at this intersection, where artistic inquiry and scientific thinking overlap without collapsing into explanation.

Through this approach, I treat observation as an active process and making as a way of thinking - one that privileges motion over intention.

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.”

Isabel Winson-Sagan is an interdisciplinary artist, often collaborating with her mother Miriam Sagan. Santa Fe based artists, they combine text & the graphic arts in all of their work. To view their portfolio, please visitl Maternal Mitochondria. On her own, Isabel works in a variety of mediums, including installation, printmaking/book arts, photography, and new media.

Elizabeth Prekas, Toronto, Canada

My work explores the shadowed corners of the human condition, such as fear, grief, isolation, loss, death, and the subconscious mind. I am drawn to what lies beneath the surface when stillness arrives and the discomfort dwells. This is where I find truth, in a space that allows for confrontation and transformation.

Through dark elements, I examine themes of mortality, mental fragmentation, and the duality of beauty and horror. I am drawn to environments that feel haunted—haunted by history, absence, or the unknown.

My work invites viewers to stop and explore what is often avoided or unseen, and to help recognize that within darkness, there lays complexity but also a light within.

Shawn Jordan, Winnipeg, MB

Living on the Canadian prairies has made me keenly aware of the macro and the micro: sky and land, vast and unknowable, minuscule and intimate — all connected and in flux. My explorations in traditional and time-based media follow trails of connections through these beautiful, and terrifying forces.  

Drawing is my first language and informs my cross-disciplinary work in video, photography, painting, assemblage, performance, and installation. This expressive, embodied way of seeing offers a bridge into a strange, yet familiar world: the ‘self’ and how our minds perceive, distort, and manifest. My investigations into quantum theories, consciousness, and time, have led me to a shift from ‘art as object’ to ‘art as energetic force’.  

Recently, during a period of healing, I turned inward, back to the roots of my practice: automatic drawing (embodiment, in the moment) and photography (seeing, in the moment) where I hover in the present, unattached to outcome. Biophilium’s Locomotion is an opportunity to venture out of this period of introspection — with all of my tools, with a curiosity about what needs to be done. It is medicine. I am ready. 

Alexis Williams, Ottawa, Canada
Director of the Biophilium

Alexis Williams is a spore spreader, silk moth protector and the director of the Biophilium. She specializes in the liminal spaces between forest and field. As an eco art teacher inspired by research biologists and ecologists, she is devoted to directing the attention of her students to the intricacies of ecology through wildlife appreciation in an attempt to develop ways to describe and celebrate the value of life. Her courses shed light on the boundaries between wild and domestic to show that there is none and aim to encourage people to notice their roles in ecology.

Alexis is an enthusiastic believer in the Symbioscene, the epoch after the Anthropocene, when humans develop practices to cohabitate the Earth and to live in reciprocity with all non-human life. She believes that humans are hyperkeystone species. We influence every habitat, ecosystem, species and have the ability to initiate complex cascading eccological interactions. That this achievement will grant us both the privilege and the responsibility to design and maintain Earth’s ecosystems, and therefore climates, intentionally. And so, we must develop a goal, agree on a set of values, plan the world we want to express, and then bring it to life. We are in a time of frightening dissonance, when our cultural practices contradict our values, but a growing appreciation for the complexities of ecology and a clear human desire for clean air & water and policies that support biodiversity is emerging and our behaviors are following. Alexis’s ecological optimism does not deny the urgency of conservation, but is a call to action.

Bedia Ekiz, Turkey

Bedia Ekiz was born in the rich ecological and biological landscape of Çukurova, characterized by its volcanic cones and leached soils. She establishes a deep connection with her personal roots shaped by the mystical historical texture of this region—ancient Anatolia, mythologies, and a nomadic-pastoral lifestyle. The region’s archaeological mounds, ancient stories, bird sanctuaries, and ecological richness form the foundation of her profound explorations into human nature and existential traces.

Drawing from her personal witness and the expression of primal pain, Ekiz approaches urban habitats and the rewilding of the “three hills” through a philosophical, psychoanalytic, sociological, ecological, and spiritual perspective. Her artistic practice is centered on examining the existential relationships of human beings and the notion of psychogeography. She documents these experiences through performance videos, sound collages, interactive objects, sketches, and scents. In her studio, she immerses herself in these sources, engaging deeply with their technical and research-based dimensions. Alongside primitive materials such as paper, ink, and charcoal, she adopts a multidisciplinary language that
allows her research to resonate with intuitive human perception.

Raised in a nomadic (Yörük) and agricultural lifestyle, Ekiz aims to raise awareness through her art around themes such as ecology, biology, psychoanalysis, psychogeography, and Anatolian narratives. She continues her work in her studio in Kadıköy, Istanbul, and in the open-air setting of her home in Üçtepe, Çukurova, where she also documents her personal
witnessing.

Mary Hegedus, Toronto, ON

I am a doctoral student at York University researching fungi, science, and visual culture. My interests centre around the knowledge we can gain from fungi. What can fungi teach us about film and media?

            For my master’s thesis at the University of Toronto I explored the parallels of the precarity and resilience of mushrooms and survivors in post-apocalyptic film. Fungi are the focus of my studies as I am interested in the fact that they represent things that exist in complex systems that humans don’t usually see.

            I am currently working on media representations of fungi and film specifically with respect to timelapse photography, Uexkull’s Umwelt theory and AI GAN modelling.

Franci Duran,

My artwork looks at history, memory and violence through the aperture of the archive: assembled and accidental. I create films, video installation, and 2D, photo-based, mixed-media works. Born in Santiago, Chile in 1967, I came to Canada as a refugee following the 1973 military coup that ousted elected president Salvador Allende. This event – the experience of exile and its reckoning – is integral to my artistic practice.

I am interested in traces and lost, irretrievable things. I take images and audio apart, and reassemble them to reveal the tactile qualities of media that are often thought of as ephemeral. Using a variety of digital and analogue media, processes and methodologies — photographs, film and digital video, hand drawing and digital illustration, analogue and digital found footage, downloaded images, texts and type, animation — I seek to make visible, to give a graphical representation and physicality to what is usually perceived as invisible and intangible, for instance, light, sound and memory. I strive to locate and follow circuitous paths produced by the intersections of the body, language and translation, popular culture, new technologies, old technologies, lost and abandoned technologies, humans and other-than-humans, archival films and recordings, personal stories, news stories, historical documents, politics, and works of art.

I am interested in the acts of looking and documenting and in the results, both pleasurable and painful. These formal and material experimentations act as metaphor for memory.

Cindi Stillwell, Bozeman, Montana, USA

My approach to making films is to capture images and sounds as a collector, sifting and arranging them as I try to come to an understanding about my place within a landscape and within a time. I am drawn to boundaries in landscapes: where ‘town’ gives way to the ‘edge of town,’ in thinking: where the line between what is scientific versus informal knowledge, and in filmmaking, along the edges of photographic reality and images that reveal the hand of the maker. I started growing a developer’s garden during the pandemic. These are flowers and herbs that I could harvest and use to create plant-based developers for my 16mm black and white film stock. This led me to begin shooting black and white images of my garden, closely examining these backyard beauties and wondering at their intricate natural designs. Which led to more thinking about domestic flowers, or cultivated backyard varieties and how they mix and mingle across the neighborhood and then how they compare to the wildflowers found in meadows across my part of Montana and beyond. I also started thinking about the time and care it takes to grow plants in our backyard gardens and how it invites me to slow down and tend to them each day, and how there is joy in just taking that time, similar to handmade, processed-based art making—the process of tending and caring becomes the joy as much as any outcome.

Renée Magaña, Kallnach, Switzerland

“Renée Magañas oeuvre resembles a virtual cemetery. But a cemetery that one visits with pleasure. Death and transience are indeed woven into all her art. Her work is colorful and cheerful, combining the child's casual curiosity with the adult's experience of loss, sensitive remembrance with subtle cheerfulness.” As a half-Mexican living in Switzerland for several decades, my artistic work deals with the different ideas and significances of death in different cultures. In Mexico, death is not a taboo, but often the subject of an ironic debate that is reflected in the light-hearted representation and form of skeletons, among other things. Death has a high value in various Mexican traditions.

My artistic practice does not distinguish between my daily life and my artistic interests. I am inspired by memories, triggered by different incidents: a smell, a photograph, an environment, a sound, the light, a film. I have been collecting, researching and preserving things dead or relating to death – as an artist and as a private person – for several decades. I collect the overlooked, the left behind, the lost or forgotten. It is a fascination for discovery in the old and the used and how I can transform them in order to present hidden stories they might have to tell.

Catherine Euale, Canada, Mexico
Biophilium Research Leader

Catherine Euale is a textile artist, social justice and environmental activist, costume designer and storyteller. In her practice, she challenges the need to use materials and methods that are noncompatible with living systems. She believes deepening and shifting our relationships with the material can raise awareness of our forgotten relationships within more than human worlds, planting seeds for a “good Anthropocene”. Designing systems for interspecies worlds can ignite tremendous political, social, and philosophical implications that we must consider for a resilient and harmonious future.

Milena Vasquez, Calgary AB

I am a Bolivian-Canadian visual artist whose practice integrates nature exploration, botanical research, and the creation of deep connections between people and the natural world.

As the daughter of renowned botanist Roberto Vásquez, I am inspired by a lifetime spent following in my father’s footsteps as an explorer, illustrator, and photographer. Searching for orchids was my way of connecting with him while he lived separately from my family. From these journeys, I learned to see nature as a sanctuary for both biological and human connection, a place of belonging.

Through Cyanotype, I create blueprints that bring my botanical archives into dialogue with my contemporary imagery and research. Using ICM (Intentional Camera Movement) photography and digital collage, I capture the unseen energy of the plants I encounter. By blending these alternative processes, I explore the materiality of memory and the interplay of light and time. My work integrates family heirlooms with organic materials gathered from forest walks, transforming this shared history into poetic meditations on ancestry, motherhood, and fi lial love.
Orchids are the central metaphor for my work, thriving through the "wisdom of decay" and interdependence. While my father’s life’s work focused on the visible beauty of orchids, I am driven to explore the invisible fungal networks that sustain them, a hidden world his research rarely touched. By moving into BioArt, I seek to expand our family legacy and bring new scientifi c perspectives back to him. My practice now aims to integrate mycology to reveal the deep biological connections that allow these species to survive and transform.

My practice also extends into community work, where I facilitate workshops and nature exploration activities. I use art and nature as portals for refl ection, curiosity, and resilience. For me, human connectivity mirrors the invisible fungal systems that support life in the forest; just as mycelium sustains the woods, our collective well-being thrives through the same care, interdependence, and renewal.