Alexis Williams, Ontario, Canada
Director of the Biophilium

 I'm a Canadian research artist interested in paradigm shifts in culture related to ecology. I have a love for biology and natural philosophy and I raise giant silk moths. I'm a long time amateur mycologist and travel the world in search of wild mushrooms, witches’ markets, muppety birds, wild things to ferment and gates to open along wildlife corridors. My work, which often highlights the kinship of Art, Science and magic is really just an invitation for you to indulge in your geekiest interests.

Ashlee Mays, Pigeon Forge, TN
Biophilium Research Leader

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.

Catherine Slilaty, Montreal, QC
Biophilium Research Leader

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.

Vanessa Iafolla, Dartmouth, NS

My artistic practice explores themes of grief, death, and life post-mortem. I am trained in ethnographic research and rely upon this training in my artistic practice, which explores cultural approaches to death and memorialization, including posthumous collaboration. This aspect of my practice developed in response to the death of my younger brother, Tristan, who died in 2024, in a car accident in Utah while on vacation. I am interested in the way death and land interact through legal structures, cultural practice, and individual experiences of death and grief. I have used plants grown by my brother, who was a landscaper with particular interests in native flora and fauna, to process photographs of the Utah landscape and make anthotypes of him. I have created a series of soil chromatograms using dirt taken from the site of the car accident, his last home, and his gravesite. I am currently working on a series of salt print photographs made using salt taken from Great Salt Lake; future plans for my art practice include making environmentally-friendly gum bichromate photographs using alternatives to potassium dichromate, and to use pigments I have made from soil harvested from places identified on his road trip in Utah.

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.

Elyse Portal, Sudbury, Ontario

I am a settler in Canada of Ukrainian, Baltic, Mennonite and Irish heritage. My work revolves around climate crisis endurance exercises that respond to climate uncertainty, land-use changes, and biodiversity loss with sensual research, ecological materials, reciprocal pigment foraging, other-than-human invitations, climate narratives, and socially-engaged ecoart practices. Living within the territory of the Atikameksheng Anishnawbek in N'Swakamok (Sudbury, Ontario), I recognize that colonialism and mining interests led to the creation of the Robinson Huron Treaty of 1850. Mining impacts directly effect the context in which I work, including the tensions among fallout of historical nickel smelter pollution, heavy metal levels, mass tailings ponds, as well as an immense community-engaged regreening project remediating the land through the re-alkalizing and planting of 10 million trees, described in my personal and collective work as part of ee portal.

I have been part of the collaborative ee portal since 2011. Our work mnemonic for the commons, initiated at the Burren College of Art - one of the longest-standing art and ecology programs in Ireland, continues to influence our practice, including the book art series we are currently developing with flask publishing.

My current projects are soil colour carbon sink, bog-moss-lettuce, and sounds are pigments are places, funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council.

I have been part of the collaborative ee portal since 2011. Our work mnemonic for the commons, initiated at the Burren College of Art - one of the longest-standing art and ecology programs in Ireland, continues to influence our practice, including in our new book art series, published by flask.

With Tilke Elkins (of the Wild Pigment Project), Heidi Gustafson (author of Book of Earth), and John Sabraw (maker of reclaimed earths from Acid Mining Drainage), I have expanded my creative land-based practice, considering safety issues in gathering, processing and making paint from contaminated places.

I worked on Wind’s Damp Song for the Soil and Other Contemplations on Ecological Justice, an exhibition co-curated with Manidoo Bineshiinh supporting 3 Northern Ontario BIPOC and Francophone artists, at Manidoo Bineshii Dreams (MBD) food sovereignty and arts space on Atikameksheng Anishnawbek. In 2024, as a board member for Myths and Mirrors, I identified and generated a partnership with Cambrian College to secure the College and Community Social Innovation Fund (CCSIF) supported by both the Canada Council for the Arts and NSERC. The 3-year project, Creative Mirror Stones: Finding Self and Community Through Socially Engaged Art, has funded BIPoC, social, and ecological
artists to lead workshops with vulnerable communities in Sudbury. Social work faculty from Cambrian College are tracking this research in relation to participant and community resilience to add to the expanding body of work in Canada and abroad linking
arts, ecology and social wellbeing.

My current projects are soil colour carbon sink, bog-moss-lettuce, and sounds are pigments are places, funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council.

I am a participant of Pigments Revealed International.

Gideon Hermann, Edinboro PA

Gideon Hermann is a jeweler and metalsmith currently located in northwestern Pennsylvania. They are pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree at Pennsylvania Western University, Edinboro. They received their Bachelor of Fine Arts with a focus in Jewelry and Metalsmithing and a Digital Fabrication and Design Certificate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in May 2021.

Their work examines post-industrial landscapes, particularly those of the Rust Belt, and the evolving relationship between industry, ecology, and time. They are drawn to places where natural processes reclaim abandoned structures: rust and rot creep in, plants emerge through concrete, and buildings slowly collapse back into the environments they once dominated. Rust is central to this work, acting as both a material and metaphor for decay, memory, and nature’s persistent reclamation.

Gideon works with mild steel, using rust as a collaborator rather than fighting against it. In their series of “Temporary” brooches, they expose steel to the elements and periodically paint them, mirroring the futile attempt to halt rust on urban infrastructure using paint. The steel continues to corrode beneath each layer, causing the paint to crack and flake. Over time, these layers form an archive of the struggle between preservation and inevitable decay. In this series, Gideon periodically documents the work to create a photographic archive of each brooch’s decay over time.

Ecology is another conceptual anchor for their work. To them, post-industrial sites hold both harm and hope. These sites bear the scars of extraction, yet plants emerge that remediate soil, water, and atmosphere. Gideon explores plants as agents of healing and interdependence, enabling us to imagine futures where human and non-human beings thrive together.

Jewelry, as a format, allows these ideas to unfold at the scale of the body. Its intimacy encourages the viewer to look closely. By miniaturizing industrial forms and elevating overlooked organisms, they create opportunities for slow observation and renewed connection. This work sits at the intersection of geometry and chance, industry and ecology, decay and regeneration. Through metalsmithing, they aim to cultivate empathy, attention, and a deeper understanding of the living systems that persist within and beyond post-industrial landscapes.

Kim Noce

Kim  is an artist, filmmaker, animator and educator whose practice explores animation as an ecological, material and participatory process. Her ongoing research, Animated Environmental Rituals, investigates relationships between animation, ecology, ritual and place through fieldwork and artistic research in Mongolia, Indonesia, UK, Portugal and China.

In Mongolia, she developed Animated Environmental Rituals: Light of the Heart’s Home during a residency at the Erdenesiin Khuree Mongolian Calligraphy & Art Center. The project brought together movement, Mongolian calligraphy, ecological materials and immersive installation. Her recent research in Indonesia explores batik animation through natural dyes , inspired by the work of “bring back the light” a conservation project exploring the life cycle, movement and synchronisation of fireflies. Across Mongolia, Indonesia and China, her work considers how local ecological knowledge, traditional practices and relationships with landscape can inform new approaches to animation.

Kim is particularly interested in how animation can move beyond representing nature and become a process of attention, exchange and ecological interdependence. Through the Mycophilia programme, she hopes to deepen her understanding of fungi, mycelial networks, symbiosis and regeneration, and explore how these systems might inform future Animated Environmental Rituals.

Dominica Harrison, UK

Dominica Harrison is an animation director, visual artist and educator whose practice combines experimental animation with printmaking, illustration and installation. Her work explores interspecies communication, ecological consciousness and the capacity of animation to express more-than-human perspectives. She is particularly interested in how movement, material transformation and speculative storytelling can challenge anthropocentric ways of understanding the living world.

Her ongoing collaborative project, Anima Mundi, brings together international artists to investigate relationships between humans, plants, animals and altered states of consciousness. Its first instalment, In the Garden: Giggles in the Greenery, explored entheogenic plants through a risograph publication and animated film. Her current short film, Re-Mind, draws on ethnobotany, panpsychism and alchemical thought to consider humanity’s search for spiritual meaning from the perspective of a more-than-human consciousness.

Harrison’s practice-led research combines artistic experimentation with interdisciplinary reading, collaboration and embodied encounters with environments and materials. She works across digital and analogue processes, including risograph and intaglio printmaking, allowing texture, repetition and material unpredictability to participate in the development of each work. Through the Biophilium programme, she hopes to deepen her scientific understanding of ecological systems and develop more informed approaches to representing non-human agency, movement and interdependence through animation.

Deanna Pindell, Chimacum, Washington

Deanna Pindell focuses on forest and water quality issues through sculpture, installation, and public art. She explores the complexity of these concerns and proposes functional, remediative solutions when possible.​ As a citizen scientist and community-engaged artist, she has worked with climate scientists, marine biologists, water-quality chemists, soils scientists and a variety of community stakeholders.

Pindell also teaches art and gives presentations on ecoart history, practitioners, and potentials. Her background includes curation, gallerist, boardmember, theatrical scenic artist and set-builder, performer, producer ... a wide range of experiences as befits a lifetime working artist.

Deanna lives with critters and conifers in rural Washington. 

Marije ter Weele, The Netherlands

I am a visual artist working across photography, material experimentation, performance, sound and installation. My practice investigates identity, perception, impermanence and the boundaries of the individual self. I am particularly interested in moments when apparently stable categories begin to dissolve: self and environment, image and material, living and non-living, preservation and transformation.

Photography has long been central to my practice, partly because of its inherent contradiction: it attempts to preserve a moment while everything it depicts is already changing. My work has therefore often moved beyond the conventional photographic print. I have worked with handmade Japanese washi, layered photographic processes and image transfers onto materials including wood and stone, exploring what happens when the photograph becomes an object rather than simply an image.

My current artistic research, The Ecological Self: Photography, Mycelium and the Art of Becoming, extends these questions through fungi.
My fascination with fungi began around six years ago and developed through both field and studio practice. I learned to forage and identify wild fungi, brought specimens into my studio to photograph and observe them, and made spore prints to study their colours and forms. Their distributed, relational way of existing resonated with questions already present in my artistic research and Zen practice around interdependence, impermanence and the instability of a fixed self.

I am now moving from observing fungi toward collaborating with them.
One strand of this research explores a fungal self-portrait in which the photographic image is offered to living mycelium. Rather than preserving the recognisable human body indefinitely, the work allows it to be colonised, transformed and eventually redistributed into another material state.
This creates a collision between two opposing impulses:

Photography attempts to preserve.
Fungi transform.

The research begins with the question:
What happens when photography—a medium built around preservation—meets an organism whose nature is transformation?

Beneath it lies the question that continues throughout my wider practice:
Where does “me” actually end?

Lorenz Wiedemann, Munich, Germany

My name is Lorenz Wiedemann and I am a digital artist and 3D Designer from Munich Germany. I recently discovered mycelium and have become deeply fascinated by its potential.  Together with a friend from the Buinho FabLab in Portugal, and its founder Carlos Alcobia, I am planning a joint venture to explore the possibilities of mycelium-based composites (MBCs).

At our family farm in Bavaria I have set up in the last months my own small Bio Lab with a laminar flow hood a pressure cooker. At the moment I am growing on different substrates: Reishi, Cordyceps, Lions Mane, Shiitake and different varieties of Oyster mushrooms.

 My professional focus lies in 3D design, computer generated imagery, and visual effects. As an artist, I have been part of the art collective Goat Solutions since 1999, where we have been exploring the subject of the goat as an artistic theme for more than 25 years.

Katja Mater, Amsterdam

My prac(ce inves(gates how images shape—and distort—our sense of reality. Both my dyslexia and my queerness inform the working methods: language is approached visually, perceiving words as shapes and (me as layered rather than sequen(al. This temporal logic runs through a hybrid prac(ce, where photography, film, drawing, performance, sound objects and installa(on intertwine. By subver(ng the use of language, the act of wri(ng and (op(cal) media, the work reveals the glitches, layers, and temporal shiFs hidden within them.

In 2022, both my parents passed away shortly aFer each other. The overwhelming feeling of grief that followed caused a total loss of (me. I started filming, to archive, but also as an aJempt to capture the bizarre moment between life and death. Since then death and grief slipped between the cracks of my prac(ce and I decided to embrace it with both arms.

Next to my solo prac(ce, I am involved in different queer and feminist collabora(ve projects as editor of Girls Like Us Magazine since 2014 and as one of the founding members of Mothers & Daughters, a Lesbian* and Trans* Bar since 2017.

Eileen Wiediger, Leesburg, VA

My artistic practice explores perception as a living, relational process. Working primarily with alcohol ink, mixed media, collage, and symbolic forms, I am interested in the space where intention and emergence meet; where material behavior and intuition interact in ways that resist complete control.
Rather than beginning with fixed narratives or predetermined outcomes, I approach art-making as a form of inquiry. The work often unfolds through layering, interruption, fluidity, fragmentation, and response. In this process, images and forms are not imposed so much as discovered through sustained attention and dialogue with the materials themselves.

I am most intrigued by transition: edges, thresholds, ambiguity, dissolution, and becoming. Much of my work investigates what can emerge when perception slows enough to encounter experience before it is immediately categorized or explained. Phenomenology, symbolic inquiry, contemplative practice, and process-oriented philosophies inform my approach, along with ongoing explorations of creativity as a mode of perception rather than solely one of self-expression. With my practice, I hope to create experiences that invite viewers into spaces where meaning remains active, participatory, and unfinished.

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.

Robin Rivers, Vancouver, B.C., Canada

I work across photography, collage, and text to recover the lives of women the historical record left out, overlooked, or misremembered. My process treats this recovery of the lost not as reconstruction but as an act of attention—an attempt to give form to women whose stories survive only in fragments, margins, and silences. That attention takes different shapes depending on what an inquiry calls for. In my Skein series, three cabinet cards revealed three generations of a single family. Each woman, photographed at the same studio wearing the same mourning brooch, held that anonymity and turned it into a question: what is the vocabulary for how a woman was meant to be seen and remembered.

Sometimes it begins closer in — with my own camera, capturing images and transforming them through collage. What unites these approaches is a series of questions: what forces have controlled what we carry forward and shaped what we perceive as cultural memory of the dead? What is lost deliberately and what disappears more quietly, through centuries of social conditioning about whose life matters and what can be discarded? I make work that examines both kinds of loss: the archive's silences and the inherited assumptions about what is worth recovering in the first place.

jessi t walsh

from rupture to garden.

Deanna Mance, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Deanna Mance is a visual artist whose work references themes of transmutation, death and rebirth, personal and ancestral history, and spiritual and ritual practices in everyday life. Through freehand and spontaneous mark-making, she allows her work to develop without the restrictions of selfawareness or premeditation. This practice embraces the unpredictable qualities and uncertain outcomes of the work, while drawing inspiration from the constraints of limited materials.

Mance expanded her work into arts education and administration at The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Sunburst School of Music and the Hyde Park Art Center. These roles strengthened her commitment to community engagement, lifelong learning, and ensuring the arts remain inclusive to all.

In 2012, she integrated her passion for the arts with end-of-life care, working with individuals living with Alzheimer’s and dementia as a Life Enrichment Coordinator. She later became a Pittsburgh Death Café facilitator, certified death doula, and founding member of Pittsburgh Community Deathcare.

Today, Mance serves as Assistant Manager of Penn Forest Natural Burial Park, where she provides guided tours, supports families through end-of-life planning, directs burials, contributes to land stewardship and community education.

Her current work-in-progress brings these experiences together. She’s harvesting wild clay from the
land at Penn Forest to create hand-built ceramic pieces gifted to the families she serves in honor of
their loved ones. Each piece offers a tangible connection to the land where they rest and serves as
a token of appreciation to those who have entrusted Penn Forest with their care.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Mance currently lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Maradee Slater, Seattle, WA

I make performance at thresholds: body and object, ritual and theatre, myth and document, terror and tenderness, presence and absence. I am drawn to the instant a material becomes a ghost, a body becomes an archive, or a place becomes a tool for facing what we are trained to avoid.

Death entered my practice through Butoh, long before loss made it personal. Butoh taught me to attend to decay, transformation, slowness, grotesquerie, and the body as something porous, impermanent, and haunted. Then death kept working with me. After my father died, I carried his ashes through New York until part of him became tattoo ink in the words “oh world that’s you!” Years later, Timothy White Eagle deepened my understanding of ritual as practice: humor, objects, care, and sacredness accompanying a person toward death. I witnessed his final weeks alongside his community. Days later, my childhood best friend died. That was yesterday [9.11.2026]

I want to study death as material transformation: what remains, what changes form, what becomes sacred, and how the living care for bodies, objects, landscapes, stories, and one another. I want to make work that stands beside the unbearable without explaining it away, and exposes the machinery without destroying the magic.

Christina Lett, Midland, GA

My work explores grief as a response to change: the evidence that something mattered, something shifted, and we were changed by it.
I am interested in thresholds - the spaces between what was and what comes next. Death is one of those thresholds, but it is not the only one. Relationships end and begin. Bodies change. Identities expand. Possibilities disappear. Beliefs collapse. Love alters us. Even joy can ask us to release a version of ourselves we no longer need.

Through painting, mixed media, and story, I make work from these moments of transition. I am drawn to images that hold both tenderness and unease: animals at the edge of something unknown, bodies transforming, objects carrying memory, beauty growing alongside loss. My work does not try to resolve grief or explain it away. I want to give it form - to make the invisible weight of change tangible enough to sit beside.

My practice is rooted in the belief that grief is not only about death. It is part of being alive in a world where nothing stays exactly as it was. I make work from that impermanence: noticing what changes us, metabolizing what remains, and offering something back.

Vanessa Iafolla, Dartmouth, NS

My artistic practice explores themes of grief, death, and life post-mortem. I am trained in ethnographic research and rely upon this training in my artistic practice, which explores cultural approaches to death and memorialization, including posthumous collaboration. This aspect of my practice developed in response to the death of my younger brother, Tristan, who died in 2024, in a car accident in Utah while on vacation. I am interested in the way death and land interact through legal structures, cultural practice, and individual experiences of death and grief. I have used plants grown by my brother, who was a landscaper with particular interests in native flora and fauna, to process photographs of the Utah landscape and make anthotypes of him. I have created a series of soil chromatograms using dirt taken from the site of the car accident, his last home, and his gravesite. I am currently working on a series of salt print photographs made using salt taken from Great Salt Lake; future plans for my art practice include making environmentally-friendly gum bichromate photographs using alternatives to potassium dichromate, and to use pigments I have made from soil harvested from places identified on his road trip in Utah.

Katie Stubblefield, Long Beach, California

Katie Stubblefield creates woodcut prints, oil paintings, sculptures, large-scale drawings, and site-specific installations that trace entropy: the slow collapse of order into chaos that also drives death and decay. Growing up in Tennessee's old-growth forests before relocating to Southern California, she developed an early fascination with tracking wind through tree canopies, an attention to unseen forces that has grown into a broader inquiry into mortality: how do living systems break down, and what emerges from their ruin.

Her imagery draws on site visits, forensic photography, first-hand accounts, and evidence of environments transformed by super-sized storms and climate change — landscapes that read as crime scenes of ecological death. Working in traditional materials and repurposed substrates like discarded plexiglass and sailcloth, she transforms environmental debris into layered studies of collapse and renewal, treating wreckage the way an investigator treats remains.

Recent work examines dust devils and updrafts as real-time indicators of an over-heated climate, overlaying flood zones and fault lines with local infrastructure. Sculptural installations incorporating fishing nets, concrete, rebar, and architectural debris freezing moments of environmental death, asking what persists, or emerges, in devastated ground.

Andrea Travaglia, Port Noarlunga South, Adelaide, South Australia

I am an emerging Adelaide-based mixed-media artist with a background in archaeology and natural/cultural heritage. I am currently exploring how value is assigned to places, objects and stories. What is collected, preserved and remembered, and what is overlooked or allowed to disappear?
Drawing on archaeological methods of observation, interpretation, documentation and stewardship, I work across painting, drawing, collage, text, photography and found materials. I am interested in the relationship between official histories and lived experience, working with fragments that carry personal and shared meaning: a surface, object, photograph, sound, route or ordinary detail.

Through site-responsive research, close observation and material experimentation, I am interested in exploring history, time, cultural identity, memory, care and environmental change. I am increasingly drawn to questions of mortality, mourning, memorialisation and ecological loss, considering how places and materials can hold traces of absence as well as presence.

Allie Dennis Glancey, Meredith, New Hampshire

My name is Allie Dennis Glancey and I am a New Hampshire based multidisciplinary artist with a primary focus in painting. Much of my work features a combination of abstract shapes and layering of patterns, and frequently implements the use of collage to convey an overall message or feeling within each piece I create. Dot work is another repeating motif I use in my work frequently as the process of painting or drawing dots has become a meditative experience that calms my mind of anxiety and depression. I create art because if I don’t then my existence will just be working at a grocery store to pay the bills and provide for my family, but choosing to be an artist has helped me to find a purpose to an otherwise remedial life.

Araks Sargsyan, Los Angeles, CA

Art has always been an essential part of my life , I know no other way of existing and functioning. It is my means of translating the life experienced by me , bringing feelings and inner tides to this realm through detailed pen and ink illustrations, sculpture and digital art.
My style transforms as I undergo my own metamorphosis. While integrating the change I always keep a past part of me there, to honor the road, to honor my past selves.

I depict dream state surreal images or 3d objects that invite the viewer to be still and observe- as in observing lies the act of being in the moment, fully embraced by my creation.

There is no single line to put down as a statement. For me existence and creativity are the main statements, the rest are thoughts and processes.

Bella Marinos, LA, California

Through my sculptures and hybrid altars, I express a longing to connect: to my community and to strangers, to my family and to my own body. Both a physical manifestation of this desire and a catalyst for communal storytelling, my work examines intergenerational trauma, death and grief, gender identity conflicts, and the ways our sociopolitical systems perpetuate suffering. As of late, I have been especially fascinated by connection, obsession, and secret-keeping present in ephemeral objects and oral histories that have been historically disregarded.

My many ceramic characters (tenderly referred to as my “guys”) are inspired by a type of Mexican folk art object, alebrijes—mythical hybrid animals. These spirits protect the living and help those who have passed move between the physical and spiritual realms. My “guys” are always genderless, and never malicious. Some are portraits of myself, friends, and family, while others are the embodiments of fleeting, emotionally-charged, often traumatic experiences.

My hybrid altars utilize found objects and oddities like locks of my estranged mother’s hair, taxidermied bugs, blood, ink, rosaries, rotting wood, latex, milagros, and beeswax candles. These combinations juxtapose elements of Catholicism, Greek Orthodoxy, and Brujeria. Repetitive elements nod to the ongoingness of religious practice, and to a repetitive fervor that borders on the obsessive.

Together, my subversive portraits and altars exist within a hazy spiritual tomb that offers a place where we can collectively mourn, wish, and remember outside the bounds of acceptable gender performance, religious guilt, and cultural expectations.

Alexis Williams, Ottawa
Director of the Biophilum

As an artist whose work is always expressing the value of life and living systems, the taboo against death as a conversation topic has not stopped Alexis from contemplating mortality in her performance, lab, wildlife photography and studio work.

Everyone can do it, but artists have a particular advantage as practiced creative players: we have a profound freedom to invent mourning rituals and regularly renegotiate our relationships with the dead, which Alexis celebrates and encourages in others. She is curently making sacred objects whose sole purpose is to reveal the magic in all mater, living or dead and the devine in every moment, banal or ceremonial.

Afuwa, Vancouver, BC

don’t be afraid of the dark forest. just know that some things are not meant to be understood.

have faith in the machete, and be strong in your heart/mind.

look back often, but go forward always, until you can go no more. you are never alone.

Emma Jolly, Kerhonkson, NY

My name is Emma Jolly. I am currently a sophomore in the New Media program with a minor in Visual Arts.

I try to practice every medium of art and creation I can get my sticky fingers on; from making music, to writing, coding, sculpting, drawing, baking, arranging, performing, sewing, filming videos, and snapping pictures -- my practice knows no bounds!

I've always had a riveting passion to learn, especially in the fields of philosophy, anthropology, thanatology, technology, and botany.

In my spare time I am often working on personal projects (music videos, songs, and performances), reading, writing, or playing dress up.
I pride myself in being a proficeint and practiced tarot reader, outdoorsman, and florist.

Miranda Newman, Toronto, Canada

I’m a bestselling award-winning nonfiction author (ROUGH MAGIC, McClelland & Stewart, 2024) and journalist whose work focuses on psychology, identity, healthcare, disability, and lived experience. My artistic practice is driven by the idea that personal narratives and concise reporting can demystify complex human realities and transform isolating experiences into shared and nuanced opportunities for connection.

I work within the intersection of literary arts, healthcare advocacy, and trauma-informed community building. My creative environment is shaped by my identity as a queer, disabled writer. I’m committed to producing work that reframes culturally challenging subjects like grief, death, and trauma through nuanced, accessible, and socially engaged nonfiction. My artistic practice grapples with systems of care and harm, from psychiatry to palliative care, and is deeply informed by my role as both a writer and peer support provider within communities that experience marginalization and medicalization.

“The End” will be my second essay collection. The research-intensive structurally ambitious nonfiction collection will combine memoir, journalism, and cultural criticism to explore topics like what we can learn about death acceptance from Ukrainian cultural rituals and attitudes, the bureaucratic systems surrounding dying and its role in grief, and dying in a society that prioritizes productivity.

Emmett Bristow, Toronto, Canada

Having graduated with an MA in Fine Art at Central St Martins, London, UK in 2024, Bristow continues to untangle grief, curiosity and queerness through a multi-faceted, regurgitating practice. Bristow’s sculptures in particular are concerned with the organic decomposition of the body as a source of power. A reverse ‘becoming’ that challenges the constraints of Late Capitalism through mess and re-articulation. Bristow’s sculptures are thought of as corpses in their own right; created by the Artist as stand-ins for the body of his brother, who he lost in 2018 and who’s body he was unable to care for. The notion of ‘stuck’ grief is explored through sculptures with their own disrupted life spans, being destroyed, re-worked and reinstalled; forming their own cyclical death. Bristow’s paintings grapple with a sickly pallet of rich greens and pinks whereby self-portraits render a small death for the Artist, one that represents transness and organism transgression with equal concern. His Essay ‘Can the Corpse Speak’ which was published in 2024, posits the decaying body and the trans body alike as historically repressed instigators of a world liberated from value through a fixed image of the body. Now living in Toronto, Canada and working without a studio, Bristow is returning to painting, graphite, and poetry disseminating various symbols such as keys, iris-less faces and found text through each medium, building a self-feeding world where grief feels safe to access, and loss is fragmented into measured chunks of creation.

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

Alexis Williams, Ottawa
Director of the Biophilum

As an artist whose work is always expressing the value of life and living systems, the taboo against death as a conversation topic has not stopped Alexis from contemplating mortality in her performance, lab, wildlife photography and studio work. Everyone can do it, but artists have a particular advantage as practiced creative players: we have a profound freedom to invent mourning rituals and regularly renegotiate our relationships with the dead, which Alexis celebrates and encourages in others. She is curently making objects whose sole purpose is to reveal the magic in all mater, living or dead and the devine in every moment, banal or ceremonial.

Aullar Mateo, Brooklyn, NY

 Grief is a deeply personal experience, but it shares many similarities that allow us to empathize with one another. It involves loss, pain, and the inexplicable abstraction of the body and mind that occurs when we mourn. These avenues of thought coalesce in a creative space that I am currently exploring. Through paintings and glass sculptures, I examine the physicality of death and decay, as well as the emotionality of what happens to the dying and those who remain. Through my work, I traverse the transitional aspects of life and death, seeking to acclimate myself to a new life and a new self after loss. Much of my art was about recording life, maintaining the shroud of immortality. Now I’ve moved out of that space of falsehood to a space that presents mortality, albeit abstract. I have come to find that I desire questions to guide me and my work, not to find unattainable answers, but to lead me to those who are willing to sit in these questions and create space for grief.

Jency Sekaran, NYC

Jency Sekaran is a New York City-based multimedia artist exploring themes on intersectionality of identity. Combining many different techniques such as printmaking, embroidery, and ceramics, Sekaran is able to depict stories of the complexity of being a third culture person in America. 

Being an Indian woman in America, Sekaran struggled with adhering to both cultures which led her to create her own culture, a third culture. By depicting the female form breaking free of cultural and societal ideology, Sekaran evokes emotions of acceptance of multiple identities and freedom of choice.

In 2013, Sekaran received their BA in Art and minor in Biology from Augusta University, however, being raised by Indian immigrant parents, she followed her parents dream of being in the sciences. Receiving her Master in Public Health in 2017 from Georgia State University, science has heavily influenced her art by incorporating organic chemistry and beakers serving as a container for memory and emotion. 

In 2023, Sekaran had her first residency and solo exhibition, ‘She is....’ at Carroll Hall in Brooklyn, NY. She currently is represented by Atlantic Gallery, and has been in multiple group shows in New York City. Sekaran has been published in the Canvas Rebel and the Artist Talk magazine as well as been on the Scouted podcast.. 

Melissa Cole, Calgary, Alberta

Traditionally, botanical illustration has tended towards the science of botany with a lesser focus on fine art or beauty. Nevertheless, most plants are things of beauty unto themselves, and as such, easily become works of art when painted with the precision and observation required of botanical artists.

My attraction to botanical illustration stemmed from an interest in southern Alberta’s native plants and ecology. Botanical illustration requires thorough observation of live specimens to create a scientifically accurate representation of the subject; once the flowers have withered and the leaves dropped the illustrations are essential tools for identification and study. While my paintings follow these scientific tenets, my background is firmly planted in the world of fine art. It is natural then, that my priority is to create pieces of art, while keenly observing plants and their place in the natural world.

By using dramatic lights and shadows to create depth and three dimensionality, my aim is to bring a plant to life on paper. My process involves quick sketches, dissections and colour studies; each component of the plant must be meticulously measured to create a detailed scale drawing before painting can commence. Working in watercolour, I use layers of subtle washes to build depth and volume before recording fine details.

This lengthy and detailed process brings me closer to my subjects, and has underscored the complexity of the natural world, and just how vulnerable and precious natural ecosystems are.

Parmida Askari, Tehran, Iran

https://www.instagram.com/marcy.comics/