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    ꧁Welcome, critters of the compost꧂ 


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© Frédérique Guay 2025


Cecropia is an entangled, curious, caring, and collaborative world.
[Roots]
Frédérique Guay is a multidisciplinary artist, community herbalist, ecology educator, and kitchen witch from the Laurentides region of Québec, now gardening in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang, Montréal. Clustering plant, soil, and multispecies worlds, her practice nests craft, herbalism, and community ecology through biomaterials sculptures and site-responsive installations. Emerging from plant and insect morphologies, mutualist relationships, protective responses, and esoteric praxis, her work tantalizes through experiments in decay, catalytic mutation, relational sensing, and hybrid becoming.

Alongside her studio practice in Chabanel, she facilitates ecology-based programs and collaborates with youth and community allies, translating complex botanical theories through collective making, sensory activation, and material alchemy. Attuned to both philosophy nodes and micro-organic chemistry, she is completing her final year in Biology, Visual Arts, and Community Art Education at Concordia University, while studying Ecological Restoration at the University of Victoria. 

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, her lore cultivates spaces where human and more-than-human worlds meet, entangle, and co-digest. In 2026, she was selected for the Bootlegger Magazine 3.5 Edition and exhibition, an upcoming Earth Tones exhibition, and the In Terre Art In Situ Residency.



[Compost Spells]
Fermenting in the liminal thresholds between soil, dream, and speculative worlds, I cultivate a cobweb practice rooted in the unruly ecologies of decay, magic, and care. My sculptures emerge as hybrid, living organisms — breathing exoskeletons, feral biomaterial bodies, and world-built ecosystems that weave plant morphologies with arthropod sensoria. They inhabit the porous and enmeshed realms, questioning what happens when ecologies circulate knowledge and care across scales—microbial, vegetal, human, planetary. 

Collaborating with intimate surroundings, I sculpt with transformed collected matter, macerated oils, native seeds, medicinal dyes, kitchen and garden scraps–later returning them to the habitats that shaped them. These spells of reciprocity act as incantations, seeds of revitalization, and offerings towards ecological loving and soft, slow tenderness. My practice remains attuned to the interstices where earthly matter meets the wide unseen, micro and macro, where composting and garden conjuring become methods of ecological and community imagining.




[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, b. 1994
Learning Opportunities


Active       Restoration of Natural Systems [University of Victoria]
Active       BFA - Major in Visual Arts and Community Art Education - Minor in Biology [University of Concordia]
2023         Course: Harm Reduction, PTSD [Solidarity Apothecary]
2015-2020    BS of Botany [Univeristy of Oregon State]
2015-2023.   Herboriste thérapeute - Clinique [Herbothèque]

2018-2020    Courses: Project Planning and Proposal Writing, Decolonizing and Creating Culturally Responsive Pedagogy, Sustainable Landscape                      Management, Mycology 201 [University of British Columbia]
Group Shows


2025         Tryphyllum, Parc du Boisé de Saint-Sulpice, 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,