Portal
Ferment
Rhizome
꧁ Welcome, critters of the compost ꧂
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c3cropia@gmail.com
© Flor 2026
Bio
My name is Frédérique Guay (Flor), and Cecropia (like the moth Hyalophora cecropia) is the name of my experimental, microlab and interdisciplinary project, diving into interspecies interactions. I am a multidisciplinary artist, plant ecologist, community herbalist, educator, and material alchemist from the Laurentides region of Québec, now gardening in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang, Montréal.
My practice engages community ecology and holistic nutrition through biomaterial sculptures and site-responsive earth installations. Rooted in the field work, kitchen, and medicine gardens I tend to, as well as rituals passed down through my family’s hands, I explore and decompose complex biological systems and relational synergies throuygh micro-experiments in composting, gardening, labs, medicinal concoctions and fermentation.
Alongside my studio practice and apothecary in Chabanel, I facilitate ecology and arts programs, while working as a field technician, research assistant and environmental sciences educator, collaborating with youth and community allies through collective making and sensory activation.
I have worked as a Botany Research Assistant, in governance relations for Indigenous land stewards, in community gardens and farms, environmental programs, medicinal street clinics and nature field schools, and as a wetland restoration ecologist specializing in native plants, and invasive species management. I hold a Diploma in Therapeutic Herbalism and studied a Bachelor of Sciences in Botany from University of Oregon State. I am also completing my graduating year (2027) 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 where I am learning more about soil conservation, traditional land management and restoration of freshwater aquatic systems.
Through the publication of pedagogical zines on community care, mutual aid, urban ecology, 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 have sprouted works for the Bootlegger Magazine 3.5 Edition and exhibition at la SAT,the In Terre Art In Situ Residency and co-brought to life Seed Alchemy.
Artist Statement
Fermenting in the liminal thresholds between soil microorganisms, plants biomes and speculative worlds, I cultivate a practice rooted in the ecologies of decay and life, across biology and food systems. I work with organic matter that I grow, scrap, collect, transform, ferment, pulp, and tend over long periods of time. My sculptures emerge as strange hybrid and imaginary organisms that may grow from a fertile compost pile. They reflect these worlds interacting: otherworldly forms deeply tied to terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems.
Ritual-based practices deeply informed my processes, such as plant medicine making, native plants gardening, composting, broth making, canning, dehydrating. I collaborate with intimate surroundings such as my kitchen, community gardens, street compost, waste depot, and urban backyard as sites of learnings, relationships and material possibility. I am interested in this circulation of materials and what is often perceived as waste. I work with materials that are alive, decomposing, or chemically transforming. I brew large cauldron of plant medicine, blend smelly fermented fibres, grow seedlings and bacteria biomats, transform plants in inks and dyes, collect farm waste, and cultivate biomaterials that will be converted into papers, cellulose membranes, pigments and dyes, and moldable composites.
Structurally, my sculptures are built like an exoskeleton. They weave plant and insect bodies and draw from biological transformation, cellular patterns, organelles, and microscopic observation. I mold them from a biocomposite that is fully biodegradable, dense in native seeds (like a seed bomb). Such seeds may be goldenrod, fireweed, rudbeckia, and many more. I later return them to the habitats that shaped them (ravines, gardens, forests...), where they will decompose through the seasons, mulch the soil, sprout, and participate in ongoing efforts toward ecological restoration. In these processes, I attend to the tensions between native, invasive, and intrusive ecologies, carefully selecting native seeds that are inhabiting these habitats or niches, and removing invasive species that are in direct competition.
I relate how food systems and ecological worlds collide in unexpected ways and I do so by researching the weird and the odd of botanical realms through theory, kitchen scratch cooking, and field work, what are often un-noticed, the pungeant, the moldy, the fungal deformation, the altered. I am particularly interested in the medicinal compounds and nourishment of plants (starch, enzymes, proteins) engaging with biochemistry, seed mechanisms, abnormal growth, chemical defense, nutrition, and host–organism relations.
I move at a slow ecological pace, use hand tools, listen to seasonal rhythms and fluid temporality. In my studio, herb bundles sit beside dried vegetable and fruit peels, wasp nests, galls, tea scraps, ferments in mason jars, SCOBY, invasive fibres, flax, wool fleece, charcoal, fire ash, and medicinal oils.
** My art, texts, photos are human-made and generated by my thoughts and reflections, with the aid of inspiring thinkers, community members and allies. I believe in the power of hands making. collective creating, and materiality, away from articifial intelligence. **
Active Research
I am currently focusing on the convergence of plant galls and tannins as sites where interspecies interaction become materially entangled. My active curiosity with galls comes from the humble complexity that a single structure can hold, revealing how the microcosmic can contain an infinite web of possible worlds. There is something uncanny in the density of relations contained within such physical smallness. Worlds are constantly metamorphosing. It teaches me a lot about the value of strangeness and how we may collaborate, radically imagine.
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
Click here to access my CV.
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,