Alexis Williams, Ottawa, Canada
Director of the Biophilium

As an eco artists, wildlife photographer and writer I enjoy contemplating what defines an individual. Where do I end and you begin? How does my immune system recognise a foreign body, and how does this change from day to day and over a lifetime? Are we actually the same person we were yesterday, or does it just seem that way? 

Looking at organisms that transform radically, or who exist in intimate symbiosis with others, reveals the illusion of a singular self. I find studying biology to be a way to become the things I know are important, valuable, magical by embodying an awareness of the intricacies of living systems and taking the opportunity to celebrate and welcome all of our identities.

In this image I'm listening to bats through an ultra sonic listening device that I buiilt into a set of horns.

Mary Abma, Bright's Grove, Ontario
Biophilium Teacher's Assistant

Mary Abma is a versatile artist who specializes in community-engaged artworks and environmental art. Always up for new challenges, Mary seeks constantly to push the edges of her practice and to learn new skills and information. Her artworks, which consist primarily of idea-based works executed in a variety of artistic forms, explore the theme of “place”. Her work embraces her interest in history, her concern for the environment, her passion for science, and her desire to find visual expression for her insights into the living world and the interconnectedness of systems. Mary’s recent works explore the systems of language and communication within the natural world.

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.

Catherine Slilaty, Montreal, QC

Stemming from a desire to explore the self as an organism of flux, my work explores the lives of speculative creatures able to transform themselves to adapt to their environment. Inspired by microorganisms, plant life, and the interior structures of organic life, I use monsters and creatures as portals to access parts of ourselves which are intrinsically linked to nature: a site where curiosity, wonder, anguish, and survival instincts collide. As a queer, neurodivergent second-generation immigrant, many aspects of my identity fall into the in-between. I’ve always been drawn to the monster in all forms of media: the othered hybrid, the outcast creature unable to be anything but its unapologetic self, undeniably powerful and free, existing outside of social conventions. I found freedom and healing through the ways monsters have always tended to embrace dread and desire head-on, through radical self-making and resilience. I see these beings as vessels for Othered bodies, allowing access to catharsis by embracing transformation: an ever-evolving, fluid and full self. My current work is focused on the evolutionary jump between the inert and the living: how the organization of matter forming organic life came to be. I’m seeking to blend the latest scientific findings on these topics with a playful speculative approach through animation and drawing.

Lilie Emblem, Montreal

I make vibrant mixed media works, especially collage and acrylic, that primarily and increasingly explore healing, and the wound and grief that made it surface. I try to balance brightness and softness to reflect on love’s healing power. There is a journey in creating these pieces, it is a very tactile process, a very sensory process, surrounded in incense and music, and so I find I dance and sing and cry and I lay my forehead on their unfinished surfaces between sessions as they emerge into the world. It is vulnerable.

To access that vulnerability is central, in a society that does not encourage vulnerability, softness, grieving. They are offerings, of healing, of ways I wish I could have healed at different times and emerged differently, softer and lighter, and still hope to. They are above all love letters, quiet and caring reminders we are less alone than it sometimes seems or feels.

Morag Paterson, Castle Douglas, Scotland

My practice explores how relationships with the more-than-human world can be shaped through careful observation, conversation and shared inquiry. Much of my recent work focuses on making the invisible present, particularly through working with microbes from the aerobiome of forest environments. Using settle plates and simple field methods, I invite others to slow down, notice, and become curious about the unseen life moving through the air we breathe.
These works often act as prompts rather than endpoints. The plates open up conversations about interdependence, exposure, permeability and care, and about how human bodies, forests and microbial worlds are continuously entangled. I am interested in how scientific tools and artistic approaches can meet without one dominating the other, and how interdisciplinary collaboration can support curiosity rather than certainty.
Alongside my artistic practice, the place where I live — shaped by ongoing debates around land use and ‘ownership' — influences my thinking. I spend significant time in voluntary advocacy around these themes, which informs how I hold space for complexity and multiple perspectives in my work.

Rachel Frank, Brooklyn, NY

I work as a licensed wildlife rehabilitator specializing in the care of waterfowl birds and raptors. This intimate work informs my practice. Combining sculpture, video, and performance my work focuses on the connections between non-human species that aid in the protection, healing, or repair of surrounding ecosystems. Using materials such as bronze, glass, and clay, all of which undergo a process of heating, melting, and liquefying before reaching their final states, I’m interested in the transformative malleability of these materials. Through use of these mediums that can move from one state to another, my practice explores the radical restoration of species and landscapes through “Rewilding”, the migratory movements of tidal and pelagic species, and more broadly, the interconnections and exchanges between species.

The contemporary late-capitalist world is one of entanglements— between biological “resources” and complex supply chains, between chemicals and microplastics and our bodies, and where climate change is decentering, destabilizing, and disrupting the familiar.

My current Chrysalid series explores this entanglement through transformative species and materials while embracing hybridity of form. Within the series, I often use the form of milkcrate (as a fragment at times). With its modernist design of grids and lattice-works, it relates to the desire to have mastery of the landscape, to harness and bifurcate nature into commodity and resource. In its fragmented form, the milkcrate becomes more skeletal and transforms into a potential portal or cage, referential to the Wardian case which was instrumental in colonial expansion and the containment and movement of botanical goods around the globe. Utilizing materials such as ceramic, glass, bronze (materials that transform and morph with heat) alongside fabric (bringing a softness or flexibility to the rigid materials), works within the Chrysalid series envision alternatives to the more common dystopian narrative where transformational forms and hybrid species might imagine a non-anthropocentric, climate-resilient future.

Hong Yang, Brooklyn, NY

I am a painter based in Brooklyn, born and raised in China. My practice is grounded in a love for the natural world. That love took root early in life while foraging for medicinal earthballs in pine forests with my mother, a practitioner of traditional Chinese herbal medicine. Those early experiences shaped how I learned to look—slowly, attentively, and in close proximity to the ground. As an adult, I reconnect with these childhood memories by going on urban mushroom walks with the New York City Mycological Club.

In recent years, I have been developing a body of work focused on the often overlooked forest floor. Some paintings dwell on the quiet rewards revealed through sustained looking—exotic fungi, or the flickering presence of fireflies. Other works explore the act of looking itself. At first, the forest floor appears chaotic: an accumulation of leaves, needles, and organic debris. But as attention slows and begins to attune to the rhythms of biological disorder, perception shifts. A single mushroom emerges, then suddenly many more, transforming confusion into visual recognition.

I see strong analogies between biological metamorphosis and the process of painting itself. This webinar offers a chance to deepen those connections and extend them into future paintings.

Lauren Flinner, Saugus, MA

It is hard for me to explain using words, why I make films, or draw, and why I share everything. I have the compulsive need to understand and to be understood.

With (largely autobiographical) explorations in film/animation, through poems, I can figure things out about myself publicly, not as a way of reaching a final, “correct” way of being, or a static perfection, but to celebrate “the movement between” in its own right.

When I read that the lectures in this series would “attempt to define what it means to be one thing and not another,” I knew this was where I needed to be, because I’ve been marinating in that cognitive dissonance, studying how it manifests in my own body and life in my private filmmaking/ animation practice, for over a decade now.

I am inspired by scientific concepts, and in general think words and language are fascinating. This would be a useful learning opportunity and a chance to meet collaborators or at the very least a springboard to continue my artistic research with more grounding in science.

Susan Whitmore, Chico and Berkeley, CA

My sculptural work is informed by my interest in the natural sciences and is an exploration of material-based research: physicality and metaphor in concepts of torn, fatigued, erupted, collapsed, or disintegrated elements and images. I use the abstract qualities and the tension between control, function and chaos in natural forms to express my love of transitional states and unknown outcomes. I am re-exploring earlier interests in modified structures in natural settings; living or decayed.

A combination of drawing, 3D printing, traditional hand skills, and a love of material exploration are used in the development of my studio work. My ceramic work brings together the tools and materials of new technologies in combination with ancient methods of ceramic construction to expand my creative language. I am currently learning studio techniques and experimenting with glass casting while exploring the transparent/translucent qualities of 3D natural materials.

Experience in ceramics and sculpture and work as a science illustrator, a land surveyor for the U.S. Forest Service, and as an exhibition preparator for the California Academy of Sciences have helped form a unique line of inquiry into object and image making. 

Kayla-Jane Barrie, Ontario, Canada

Kayla-Jane is an experimental poet and artist who finds awe between the lines of science and imagination. Her darkly enchanting work asks philosophical questions with a speculative twist. The poetic power of humanity and nature ignites her curiosity. She combines mixed media and writing to examine the human experience and communicate scientific research related to the soil, stars, and beyond.

You can find her work in Eccentric Orbits, The Fulcrum Review, Dwarf Stars, and Consilience.

Kayla-Jane, based in Ontario, Canada, seeks to explore 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.

Alexis Williams, Ottawa, Ontario
Director fot he 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.