Roots
Ferment
꧁Welcome, critters of the compos꧂
CONTACT
Cecropia is an entangled, curious, caring, and collaborative world.
[Roots]
I am Flor (she/elle/they) and Cecropia is my living, collaborative world. I am a multidisciplinary artist and maker, community herbalist, kitchen witch, gardener, educator, compost collaborator from the Laurentides region of Québec. I am currently based in Tiohtià:ke, Mooniyang, Montréal. I am completing my final year in Plant Biology, with a Major in Visual Arts and Community Art Education at Concordia University, and also studying Ecological Restoration with University of Victoria. Prior to this, I pursued a Bachelor of Science in Botany at Oregon State University, where I also studied permaculture, and landscape design. Close to my heart, I have completed studies in Therapeutic and Harm Reduction Herbalism with Wild Rose College, Herbothèque and Solidarity Apothecary.
[Creative Portal]
In my transdisciplinary art practice, I collaborate and cast spells with the materiality and relationality of compost, soil, and kitchen realms to turn over caring stories and unexpected intimacies. This intimate,embodied, ritual, and imaginative practice unfolds through cooking, fermenting, touching, and dreaming — food, medicine, and ecology interwoven like a trifolium knot.
Compost, care, community, critters, cocoon, crock, cicada, chloroplast — this multilayered realm I have sprouted, Cecropia, is infused with companionship and cobwebs.
Through stringy/scrappy stories of care, I sprout sculptural organisms — living spells that intertwine morphologies between plants and arthropods. Through material and ritual, they connect to recipes, tea, plant medicine, urbans ecosystems and gardens. They are composed of fibers and organic matter, assembled like a hot compost pile with cardboard, paper, garden and kitchen “scraps”, water, and air. I infuse these organisms with plant medicine scraps (teas that have already been infused), macerated oil spells, crystals, native seeds, and medicinal dyes or inks made from scraps.
I work with materials and techniques such as papermaking, biocomposites, fermentation, natural dyes, inks and pigmentation, cordage-making, seed banking, cockling, engaging with fiber pulp like clay and wood through compacting, coiling, and carving.
I hope to acknowledge the agency and preciousness of relationships — human and more-than-human — through a microbiome made macro: microbes, fungi, molds, tissues, membranes, seeds, arthropods, galls, nests and multispecies companions.
I follow a slow ecological pace, appreciating labour, gathering with species, using manual tools, and getting my hands and skin dirty. I world-build around pratices of care ; altar, potions, garden conjuring ; sensorium.
[Care Potion]
I care for care, alchemy, energy, spells, dreams, matters of care, plant-based cooking, plant medicine, energetic vitality, crystals, fossils, composting, fermenting, pickling, intergenerational tenderness, microbiomes, ants’ underground compost, fungi, and transdisciplinary multispecies collaborations — the internodes of making, where art and food scraps become offerings for soil allies (humans, more-than-humans).
My practice is site-specific, rooted in the soil and social ecologies of urban spaces. I work with what grows here — learning from plants and arthropods that are sown and displaced, such as common reed and goldenrod. Through this slow and laborious collaboration, I create hybrid sculptural organisms formed with invasive or intrusive plants, carrying native seeds, compost, and herbal infusions. I transform collected matter from site and from kitchen and street scraps (leave, bulbs, seeds, fibers, tea, brown paper...), make, assemble, and plant these organisms back into the habitats they inhabit, akin to earth balls. They are vessels of revitalization — acts of care toward native ecological regeneration, from gathering materials to seed banking to returning them to soil.
There is a deep intimacy and sensuous connection in each compost to its place. Through touch and smell, the portals open — rooted love letters and gifts of generosity, decanting and fermenting our shared ability to compost collectively.
[Community Care and Transparency]
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.
xx Flor (she/they),that is me, and Cecropia is this realm I am conjuring alongside magical beings, humans, critters, plants, water. [In honor to the Hyalophora cecropia silk moth, pupa, cocoon]
With gratitude for you being here,