Portal
Ferment
Rhizome
꧁Welcome, critters of the compost꧂
✧⋅.˳˳Instagram˳˳.⋅ ˙✧
c3cropia@gmail.com
© Flor 2026
[Bio]
My name is Flor (Frédérique Guay), and Cecropia (like the moth Hyalophora cecropia) is my enmeshed, curious project. I am a multidisciplinary artist, botanist, community herbalist, educator, material alchemist, and kitchen witch from the Laurentides region of Québec, now gardening in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang, Montréal. I love moths, exoskeletons, microbial enzymes, seeds physiology, wetlands, all that is living-and-decaying and world-building, dreams, spells and portals.
Clustering earthly and stellar networks, my practice engages community ecology, and restoration through biomaterial sculptures and site-responsive installations. Rooted in the medicine gardens I tend, rituals passed down through my family’s hands, and plant and insect morphologies, I explore place and relational synergies through micro-experiments in composting, gardening, medicinal concoctions, fermentation, and field sensing.
Alongside my studio practice and curious apothecary in Chabanel, I facilitate ecology and arts programs, collaborate with youth and community allies through collective making and sensory activation. I hold a Diploma in Therapeutic Herbalism, and I am completing my final year in Biology, Visual Arts and Community Art Education at Concordia University, while studying a Diploma of Restoration of Natural Systems with the University of Victoria. I have worked as a Botany Research Assistant, in community gardens and farms, environmental programs, medicinal street clinics and nature field schools.
Through the publication of pedagogical zines on community care, mutual aid, and compost, and through exhibitions such as Loulou pour toujours (2025), Earth Tones: Magic Items (2024), as well as public and in-situ projects including La Falaise, Prairie Louvain, and Parc du Boisé Saint-Sulpice, my lore cultivates spaces where human and more-than-human worlds meet, entangle, and co-digest. In 2026, I am sprouting works for the Bootlegger Magazine 3.5 Edition and exhibition at la SAT, an upcoming Earth Tones exhibition, and the In Terre Art In Situ Residency.
[Artist Statement - Compost Spells]
Fermenting in the liminal thresholds between soil, dream, and speculative worlds, I cultivate a practice rooted in the unruly ecologies of decay and life. My sculptures emerge as strange hybrid living/dying organisms—breathing exoskeletons and feral portals. They weave plant and arthropod morphologies with energetic meridians, inhabiting porous realms shaped by metabolic flux—anabolic and catabolic forces continuously building, dissolving, and reconfiguring form. Within them, care circulates across scales: microbial, vegetal, human, planetary.
Through ritual-based practices, I collaborate with intimate surroundings to distill micro, heart-searching worlds, as composting and garden conjuring operate as dynamic methods of community imagining and civic engagement. I move at a slow ecological pace, listening deeply to seasonal rhythms, guided by the compost pile, seed-collection, field notes and herbarium practices. I sculpt with transformed organic matter such as plant fibres, native seeds, medicinal infusions, and biomaterials, later returning them to the habitats that shaped them. My sculptural fabulations are love stories, joyful conduits, unfolding as spells of reciprocity, incantations, and offerings toward soft tenderness. Through constant turnover, my processes blur the boundaries between folk and scientific inquiry, reclaiming tangible potion-making, fermentation, and herbal experimentation as rigorous, relational forms of knowledge.
Rooted in ethnobotany, community and queer ecologies, folk and biodynamic gardening methods, and entomology, I collaborate with materiality that is emergent, animate, chemically transformed through fermentation into pulp and biocomposites, such as tea scraps, invasive plant pulp and bacteria/yeast biomat. I sculpt living anatomies/membranes that twine the cellular systems of plants/insects/spiders, abnormal growths, with physchic visualizations, sprouting new germinations within the traditions of medicinal grimoires, herbaria, field conservation, and entomological preservation. I reveal the tensions emanating amongst native and invasive/intrusive soil-habitats, abandoned spaces and community gardens. My body of work forms an entropic portal of unexpectedness, and strategies towards urban transformation, rendering visibile traces of care, decomposition and regeneration.In these in-situ works, nutrient cycles, microbial agencies, and domestic residues move and activate conversations and mediation from kitchens into neighborhoods and urban ecosystems. I aim to proliferate resilient strategies and responsabilities towards ecological revitalization, cooperative sensitivities and radical imagination.
In my studio, you can find herb bundles, dried veg/fruit peels, wasp nest, galls, tea scraps, scoby, invasive fibres, flax, wool fleece, medicinal oils. I brew tea, mold swamppy fibres, smell my ferments, and grow seedlings.
[Care Potion]
I believe in Restorative Justice, free and generous access to health/education/safety/home/tenderness/mutual aid, Indigenous, Black and non-white Leadership. My work is in direct relationships with (de)colonialism, food security, land sharing and free access, holistic and safe health care systems, community organizing, free education.
Transparency: I am a white, french descent, daughter, sister, able-body from rural Québec, with access to education, health, financial stability, garden. My grandmother/mother shared their ways of knowing through cooking, pickling, gardening, knitting and sewing. My maternal grandfather who was a fisherman taught me how to navigate within nature, knowing the medicine and energies of trees, plants, water, wind, air.
Community care: My able-body helps in growing mutual aid medicine for community and redistributing my tacit and learned skills through free opportunites in community centers, gardens, backyard, schools, personal kitchen, online, zines. I collaborate with youths in art education and ecology through making, playing, embodying. Learning, un/learning and growing the space I share, I am committed to invest in Restorative Leadership, and divest from harming systems. This is practiced by ongoing care towards youths, gardens, community kitchens and food security, backyard gatherings, grassroots non-profits.
Tenderness: My practice would not be living and decaying without the tenderness and long-held caring relationships of Indigenous Peoples such as the Kanien'kéha, Haudenosaunee and Anishinabeg (and many more), and new comers that share knowledge, heart and life to the lands my peoples have stolen. I have the deepest gratitude for community and family, and hope my spells can invest, and plant seeds for long tender relationships amongst multidiverse communities. My gratitude is met through planting native seeds, invasive plants materiality (not eradication), redistributing financial support, seeds, food, medicine, and space.
[CV]
Frédérique Guay (Flor)
Born 1994, Laurentides, Québec
Training and Learning
2025-present Diploma- Restoration of Natural Systems, University of Victoria (British Columbia)
2023-present Bachelor of Fine Arts – Visual Arts, Art Education, and Biology, Concordia University, Montréal (Québec)
2024 Certificate, Herbalism, PTSD & Trauma, Solidarity Apothecary, online (United Kingdom)
2024 Workshop: “ papier et matériel,” led by Anne-Marie Dupont, Cantons-de-l’Est (Québec)
2023 Workshop: “filage et rouage” facilitated by Habi Habi, Irene Textile, St-Sauveur (Québec)
2023 Certificate: 4 Seasons of Indigenous Learnings, Reconciliation Education, online
2023 Certificates: Indigenous Canada / Aboriginal Worldviews and Education, University of Alberta, online (Alberta)
2021–2023 Courses: Project Planning and Proposal Writing, Decolonizing and Creating Culturally Responsive Pedagogy, Mycology University of British Columbia, Vancouver (British Columbia)
2015–2023 Diploma, Clinical Herbal Therapist, Herbothèque, Lantier (Québec)
2022 Wilderness First Responder, Coast Wilderness Medical Training, Vancouver (British Columbia)
2022 Training and Community Project, CPAWS-BC Young Leaders in Conservation Program (YLICP), Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, Victoria (British Columbia)
2022 “Flax Ecologies” workshops, facilitated by Sharon Kellis, Trillium Park, Vancouver (British Columbia)
2022 “Dyes and Stewardships” workshop, facilitated by Still Moon Arts, Ravine Park, Vancouver (British Columbia)
2021 Courses: Climate Resilient Gardening, Sustainable Landscape Management, Oregon State University, Corvallis (Oregon)
2015–2020 Bachelor’s degree in Botany, Oregon State University, Corvallis (Oregon)
Group Shows
Upcoming Bootlegger Magazine Edition 3.5, SAT, Montréal, Québec.
Upcoming Earth Tones, Montréal, Québec.
2025 Tryphyllum, Parc du Boisé de Saint-Sulpice, Montréal, Québec.
2025 Loulou pour toujours, Espace Loulou, Montréal, Québec.
2025 Loulou pour toujours, Espace Loulou, Montréal, Québec.
2024 Living Charms, EV. 10-760, Concordia University, Montréal, Québec.
2024 Offline, EarthTones Event, Avenue du Parc, Montréal, Québec.
2024 Magic Items, EarthTones Museum, Online, Montréal, Québec.
Residencies
2026 In SITU, InTerre Art, Research and Creation. Montréal, QC.
Publications
2026 Bootlegger Magazine Edition 3.5.
2025 Potions for Curiosity. Collaborative zine on art education. Zine.
2025 Compost Materiality. Created of a zine on Materiality and Compost, including recipes. Zine.
2024 Compost Portal. Created a zine on Compost thresholds, including recipes and philosophies. Zine.
Unique Projects
2025 Artist Calendar. Designed the month of March, tapesworld.
2023 Naesha Spell. Designed a graphic for a skateboard, Bug Skateboard.
2021 Cosmic Nature. Selected design for the pressing of skateboard. Alltimers.
Enmeshed Work
Active Trifolium Herbal. Founder of a Herbal Mutual Aid. Montréal & Vancouver.
Active Art Educator. La Cabane, Montréal.
2024 Studio Assistant. Atelier Pascale Girardin. Montréal
2024 Art Educator, CEDA, Montréal.
This realm is conjuried alongside magical beings, humans, critters, plants, water. [In honor to the Hyalophora cecropia silk moth, pupa, cocoon]
With gratitude for you being here,