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.

Catherine Euale, Canada, Mexico
Biophilium Research Leader

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

Milena Vasquez, Calgary AB

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.