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.

Ashley Czajkowski, Arizona
Biophilium Research Leader
Professor of Death and Photography at Arizona State University

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

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

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

Alison A. Smith, Carbondale, IL, USA

In my photographic art practice, I look for the uncanny and embrace mistakes to offset my default tendency that leans toward perfectionism.

By means of digitalizing, transforming and combining my photographic images with the found drug store color prints, the barrier of time is extended on a shared 2-D plane. It allows for an image of my grandmother to reemerge in the physical space she used to inhabit. The visual alignment shared across the photos, captured decades apart, is both startling and comforting.

I am interested in how the technical process of collage speaks to the construction of memory and the role photography plays in aiding memory, providing visual evidence, and processing grief.

In my main body of work, I capture small-scale, arranged scenes inspired by the historic and contemporary still life genre. The compositions feature a mixture of “antique” objects -- purchased or inherited, newly produced good, in addition to wild and cultivated plantings from the land around my home in Southern Illinois. It is through the imposed sense of order created in each composition that subtle tensions emerge. Working only with natural ambient light, my practice involves adapting with the seasonal changes which mirrors the work’s concepts of expectations, ambivalence and loss.

Adrienne Defendi, Palo Alto, CA

Adrienne Defendi is a multimedia artist whose work explores the cyclical, the ephemeral, and the fragility of life. Her lifelong interests in memory, narrative, and materiality inform her photographic expression and artistic process. Employing different mediums, from analog to alternative processes and various printmaking techniques, her practice charts elements of loss and ritual, and the boundless possibilities within reiteration and experimentation. Adrienne lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Tawhida Tanya Evanson, Montreal

It begins in poetry and expands out into orality, music, movement, multimedia, film and fiction. 
It is a literature reuniting with its sonic, mystic and ceremonial roots to heal the human being. 
 
It calls upon West African griots and meta griots to guide in ancestral history, ingenuity, storytelling, praise song and the Afrofuture. 
It sits in the silsila سِلْسِلَة of Tassawuf/Sufism a thread of mystic knowledge, a fakir of devotion, prayer in the Beloved.
 
It aspires to be unified and generous while resisting capitalism, fascism and ownership of self. 
It dies before dying. Invisible World as real. Writing as prayer. Orality as sacred act. Music and meditation at the divine centre.

Vivekananda Kadakam Ramakrishna, Mangalore, Karnataka, India

For me, art is a continuum—a tapestry woven together with research, personal memory and responsive performance, where something new enters the world by extending what already exists. I was raised by women across three generations, with a steady diet of oral stories that taught me how to live inside many worlds at once. Those stories showed me that the dead are not gone, but they persist in gestures, rituals, land and voice.

My practice is shaped by grief, ritual and the afterlives of memory. I often find myself returning to the question: What does it mean to die carrying the knowledge of a life lived? What does it mean to live in a world that chooses who is worthy of memory? Grief to me is not only personal but I see how it is structural, historical and systemic. The inability to mourn with dignity opens a way of looking at caste, class, queerness, erasure and colonial violence.
I often think of my own ancestors—those whose names never reached me, whose lives were not archived or whose stories were absorbed into land and water. My work does not try to speak for the dead but it sits beside them, honoring what persists without monuments.

Whether I work through painting, performance or immersive worlds, I treat each act as a memorial without a body, one that is layered, iterative and alive, like memory flowing through water.

Rebecca Armstrong, (The place currently known as) Danville, PA, USA

I make work to open spaces for humans to feel what we avoid–– grief, awe, complexity, even dread. I use natural materials, sound, and time in works that range from installation to photography. I think of the work as a vessel for human difficulty because I believe the avoidance of such difficulty is responsible for violence and disconnection. Creating an experience that touches and allows someone to process whatever in themselves
they avoid is transformative. Much of my work centers around embodiment because the body cannot avoid its griefs; we ache, we fracture, we deform. Using an often spare aesthetic and materials that have rich historical significances allows the work to address settler values, domination, and displacement through materiality. Bone china, marble, historical letters, and the sounds of extinct animals are a few examples of materials that layer historical significance into the present work. I am also always in search of a transcendent wildness, a freedom from the body, the bounds of the self, and our limited understanding of the world.

Camille Ratté, Québec City, Canada

My artistic practice is rooted in the aesthetics of the everyday and reflects on death within the realm of daily life. I explore mortuary rites through intimate gestures and familiar actions, approaching them through the lens of thanatology. This approach shifts the experience of mourning and the preparation for death into a more personal space, raising social questions of ritual, the boundary between the living and the deceased, and the staging of the body.

Through the reappropriation of ordinary gestures and domestic objects, my video performances examine our relationship to finitude. They also reveal how everyday rituals can generate comfort, even happiness, and serve as a way to ward off the anxiety of the end.

Arianna Tinulla Milesi, Leicester - UK and Toscolano Maderno - Italy

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.

Klaire Doyle, Manchester, United Kingdom

Klaire Doyle is an interdisciplinary artist and art educator from Northern England.

Her practice investigates sentient / insentient lived experiences and the reclamation of feminine abjection via action, scenography and participatory practice. Vulnerability and curious narratives are at the heart of Klaire's research which longs to answer questions to better navigate the world she lives in. Phenomenology and storytelling is also of great influence to Klaire's practice as she sources experiences of her own and those close around her in an autoethnographic / ethnographic journey to represent those histories. Her work often confronts these discoveries with grotesque humour and a sarcastic bite to overshadow misrepresentations

Klaire's works have been internationally exhibited since 2014, including solo and group works in New York City, Venice Architecture Biennale, Moscow, Tokyo, Helsinki, Melbourne and the Liverpool TATE Exchange.

Ellie Ryan, Halifax Nova Scotion

Following the deaths of a best friend and two close family members when I was twelve years old, I noticed the people around me were reluctant to answer the questions I had around death and dying. In the search to answer the question of what happens as we die. This trauma informed artistic exploration of death has defined both my personal and professional practice and is woven into the projects that I create.

Equipped with a projector and sewing machine I try to bridge the gap between traditional and expanded mediums, stitching together the topics of death and decay with the innate beauty of life and memory. Through the use of both real and digital imagery I encourage the viewer to lean into discomfort and disregard preconceived notions of what art and death can mean. Whether that be bringing art and media into new and unexpected places or through honest advocacy and open discourse surrounding death and the culture associated with it.

With a push to create interactive work, I look to break the boundary of typical gallery expectations, encouraging the viewers to get up close and personal with many of my works, inspiring people to shift how they interact with art in the everyday. Utilizing found fabrics and footage I intertwine the mediums into something new and exciting while paying homage to what came before.

Tate Obayashi, New York City, NY

When my father suddenly passed away in January of 2020, I put my career as a prop designer in New York City on hold. Then the pandemic hit. During this tumultuous time, filled with both personal loss and global tragedy, death was at the forefront of my mind—it consumed me. As I searched for an urn for my father, I found that most options on the market were stark reminders of his absence. Austere, traditional and lacking in personality. I wanted an urn that celebrated my father for who he was: charismatic, humorous, and, perhaps, a little flawed. Something that reflected a life well lived. Having used creativity as a coping mechanism for much of my life, it felt only natural to channel my grief into art. After several years of development, I’ve created a collection of ceramic deathware – urns, altars, amulets and ceremonial objects under the name Bad Days. Drawing inspiration from ancient burial traditions, Victorian memento mori, and Japanese design, each piece is meticulously hand-sculpted from clay, then glazed in vivid colors, and at times adorned with semi-precious stones and leather. Every piece fits right at home while still honoring a dearly departed loved one.

Alma Star, East Stroudsburg, PA, USA

I am a star. I create cosmic connections from my soul to the beings of eternity. I channel sacred information from spiritand document my communication with mixed media, audios, videos and soft sculpture assemblages. Star identifies as death incarnate and focuses on documenting her life with the sacred beings of death and of eternity. She is of Andean ancestry and explores soul identity by merging soul evolution within her practice.

Star’swork focuses on cosmic communication and the personal encounters and discussions she collects from her experiences.

Carmen McCullough, Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, United States

As a mixed media artist, I create collages and assemblages with paint, paper, fabric, vintage family photos, and found objects. My work is a dialogue between memory and imagination, often weaving personal history with universal symbols.

I am inspired by old and abandoned places, the moon and stars, quiet cemeteries, and the changing seasons — spaces and moments where time feels both suspended and fleeting.

People often ask why I use skulls and skeletons in my work. Growing up on a farm and woodland area in the 1970s, it was not uncommon to come across the bones and skulls of different animals — it was simply part of the landscape. That early familiarity made skulls feel natural to me, not morbid. Today, I use them as symbols and reminders: we all share the same fate. This awareness, far from grim, is a powerful invitation to truly live. For me, skulls aren’t about death—they’re about cherishing life. Memento Mori!

My artwork has been featured in creative publications, and my self-published collage books are available on Amazon.com. Learn more and sign up for my monthly artsy updates at StrangeFarmGirl.com.

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.

Gizeem Canden, Montreal,

My work explores the intricate relationship between the human figure and landscape and reflects on the themes of anxiety, precious life, death, and rebirth using multidisciplinary approaches such as painting, foraged pigments, biomaterials, and video. As a form of alchemical transformation, raw materials undergo a metamorphosis and create a field for healing both the body and the mind. I capture the intersection of the tangible world and the inner emotional stage by reimagining the hidden stories of employing water and soil as a symbolism of renewal. By embracing the conflict between
the beauty of nature and the repositioning of late-modern humans themselves in troubled times, I create a visual language through form and colour.

By foraging, cooking, burning and grinding, my work demonstrates the ephemeral beauty of earth and botanical colours. The methodology of my material-based research is to investigate organic waste streams in the city and create a landscape-focused language through invasive plants in the local environment to build a connection with the more-than-human world.

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.

Nasrah Omar, NYC/London, UK

Nasrah Omar (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans photography, XR, collage, and ritual installation. Her work is rooted in diasporic memory and ancestral world-building, exploring the entanglements of ritual, visibility, and itinerant belonging. Drawing from frameworks of hauntology and necropolitics, she interrogates how histories of colonialism, migration, and erasure continue to haunt the present, shaping who is allowed to live, who is left to die, and how the dead linger within collective memory. For Nasrah, death is not an ending but a threshold: a porous site where ancestral voices, ecological cycles, and spectral technologies can converge. Her projects reimagine grief as compost for healing, treating digital platforms as haunted interfaces through which revenant voices emerge. Her installations create places to mourn and to push back at the same time: spaces for care, mutual support, and repairing what’s been harmed. 

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.