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

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.

Wenhui Lim, Singapore

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

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

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

Beth Shepard, Ottawa, Ontario

I am an Ottawa-based visual artist working photography, video, sculpture, printmaking, drawing and painting. For over a decade I focused on the representation of animals in art, especially animals in the industrialized food production system.  With the pandemic, I shifted my attention to my immediate environment – the shores of the Ottawa River. I realized that the destructive impacts of the human species on nature are everywhere. 

I have an MA in Art History, a BA in Psychology and a BSc in Biology, which provide me a variety of tools and perspectives for carrying out my research-based art practice. I explore the ecocritical constructs of “landscape” and “nature,” reflecting on how art can both hide and reveal environmental truths. My intention is to overcome natural tendencies to euphemize or forget the damaging environmental impacts of extractive colonialism, urban development, overconsumption and waste, and our continued dependence on fossil fuels and novel entities polluting the biosystem.

Some recent projects include Littorally Speaking: A Coffee Table Book; Plastic Shores, a print series depicting dead shore birds; Shoreline Lost and Found, a time-lapse video with spoken text; waste plastic sculpture, and print studies of endangered local species, like eels and turtles, and paleo-extinction.

Shaleem Ahmed, Manchester, UK

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

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

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

Kayla-Jane Barrie, Ontario, Canada

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

Lucy Rupert, Toronto, Canada
Biophlium Research Leader

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

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

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

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

Natalie O'Harra, Yucaipa, California

For the beauty of the earth. For the beauty of the skies. For the love from which our birth. Over and around us lies. For the beauty of each hour. Of the day and of the night. Hill and vale, tree and fl ower. Sun and moon, and stars of light.

The words from this hymn have been rattling around my head for months while I look for connections between the weeds in my backyard, washing my hands, laughing with children, and talking about where the water goes after a rainstorm. I scroll through photos on my phone, seeing the mundane and the meaningful mixed. I feel sadness for no longer being the person I was, while not wanting to be that person anymore. There is a struggle for what I want to become.

I am currently making artwork that explores memories mixed with dreams. I am interested in the plants that grow without being asked, mystery novels, and the stories we tell over meals with friends. I want my work to be familiar but also a bit mysterious. The work could be physical or digital, lately, it has been watercolor.

In applying to Locomote, I seek to learn more about the reasons we migrate and the methods we use to navigate. I hope to fi nd connections between environmental movements and my current state of motion/stuckness/desire to evolve.

Wenhui Lim, Singapore

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

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

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

Klaire Doyle, Manchester, United Kingdom

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

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

Ontological Praxis (Eve Walton), Rockville, MD USA

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

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

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

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

Shawn Pearman, Saskatchewan, Canada

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

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

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

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.

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.

Charly Nelson, Salt Lake City, UT USA

My art practice explores overlapping memory, time, belief, nature and imagination — borne of growing up between two cultures, seeking interconnectivity, and finding solace in natural landscapes and materials. I follow art channeling techniques used by both surrealists and spiritualists including meditation, channeling, scrying, and automatic creation as the generative process for my work. My work centers on cornerstones of agency and freedom that instill courage, hope, acceptance, and possibility.

Through earning my Masters of Landscape Architecture I was drawn to telling the story of a place, and ultimately made crafting written and visual communication about designed places a career. This interest in storytelling led me to pursue an MFA in Screenwriting where I could be creative within the bounds of a specific structure. Now I explore the otherworldly within the exceedingly ordinary, the unexplainable, thresholds and liminal spaces where time is suspended and imagination can reign.

I’m weaving all of these interests into a multi-disciplinary career spanning writing, and visual arts and threading places and cultures, natural and man made formations, weathering and the erosive inevitability of change.

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.

Alexis Williams, Ottawa, Canada
Director of the Biophilium

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

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

Bedia Ekiz, Turkey

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

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

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

Jennifer R. Myhre, Sedona, Arizona, US

I was a scholar before I was an artist, and reading and research is a core part of my artistic practice. My art journey began with documentary filmmaking. This foundation has shaped my current practice in collage–setting images and ideas side by side to provoke new responses. Through layering and juxtaposition, covering and revealing, collage allows visualization of how I wrestle with my own denial and accountability in the human systems that produce large scale suffering. I consider the desert my heartland. I love using the tools of art and art-making for education and community building around complex issues and I believe in the power of these tools to address the urgency of climate change, ecological devastation and ongoing threats to public lands. I was born in Tucson and spent my teenage years there, but I only returned to Arizona to live in 2024. Since returning, I have prioritized belonging to this land, understanding it and taking responsibility for loving and listening to it and protecting it. This has included taking foraging classes, reading about the land, learning about indigenous history and of course hiking. As a white person in a place still shaped by settler-colonialism, I have been studying and thinking about what it might mean to live in solidarity and in kinship with both indigenous communities and the earth.

Mary Hegedus, Toronto, ON

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

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

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

Franci Duran,

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

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

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

Cindi Stillwell, Bozeman, Montana, USA

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

Shawn Solus-Edrington, Pocatello, ID

My work investigates the ecological, cultural, and sociopolitical practices that intervene and reshape the form of contemporary landscapes. Subject of both art and the sciences, landscape operates both as mirror and lens, reflecting the spaces we occupy and ourselves within them. Through trace, transposition, and re-interpretation, my work engages in an open-ended
investigation, transferring the physical experience, associations, histories, and mythologies of a place away from their original source wherein its uncanniness can come into focus, allowing for revaluation and reconception. By means of installation, I employ print, sculpture, video, and sound in formalizing and disrupting spatial environments while problematizing certainties about the stability and causation of what is being seen or encountered within.

My approach to making art is intertwined with sense of place. Raised in the West, my particular relationship to the idea of place is entangled with both myths of sublime wilderness and monument, and the marring impacts of industry, climate change, and sprawl. My work is borne
out of an interest in the intersections of land use, extraction, infrastructure, consumption, and ecology. In considering my own involvement in these systems; knowingly and unknowingly, directly and indirectly, I seek to localize my investigative impulse, to reference issues that have a closeness or proximity, that is to consider how we are always already wrapped up in those things that we try to examine as if existing somehow “outside”. Documenting my experiences in and of these spaces, synthesizing that with other sources of experience, local knowledges, and scientific findings inevitably leads to a feeling of being implicated in some way, inexorably enmeshed. It is this kind of response that I try to rouse, confront, and explore in my work.

Recently I have developed work investigating the sonic and architectural ecologies of both insects and the proverbial “engines” of human enterprise. I am interested in the aural and morphological features of our human noise juxtaposed by the soundscapes of the insect
kingdom; drones whirs, buzz, clicks, and hiss. Through field recordings, found objects, video and print, this works explores the influence that these often overlooked, even vilified critters have on us as humans and in turn our influence on them.

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.