SEED TRAY

SEED TRAY
MAGGIE GROAT
AUGUST 15 - OCTOBER 24 2026

SEED TRAY is the latest chapter of the multipart S LOWER F, an ongoing project driven by research-creation methodologies of slowness, play, healing, and deep time engagements as acts of resistance and refusal. This new installation compiles the residual works on paper from the previous four chapters as a living archive. This collection includes twenty-three new collages that consider how the practice of collage is akin to the identifying and gathering of foraging, the shaping, weeding and cutting of the garden, and the renewal of the fermenting scraps in the compost bowl.

Throughout S LOWER F collage has been employed as an alternate form of documenting lived experience. The new images of SEED TRAY attempt to capture personal, psychedelic encounters with the natural world, experiences of non-linear time, and the otherworldly, sometimes ominous, quality of plants and their ecologies. They can also act as other kinds of tools, like sleep aids, garden templates or visual games; or to project speculative super realities, surreal landscapes, and uncanny inventories.

The compilation of images in SEED TRAY evidence a variety of approaches to working with a range of pre-internet printed matter. This practice of image decontextualization, fragmentation, and reconfiguration rests on the abundance of discarded 20th century mass media knowledge dissemination and its associations to ideas of access, excess, leisure, self-study, DIY culture, niche subject matter, and changing print technologies.

With SEED TRAY, the project continues to consider the possibilities of low-impact exhibition making, including utilizing second-hand and sustainable materials, and assembling modular components that temporarily compile and then collapse towards potential redistributed and repurposed futures. With only gravity holding it together, the assemblage points to the precarity of the pile or stack.

Since 2023, S LOWER F has been strategically stitched together in parts as a way to make a book work slowly and responsively, considering the interaction and tension between temporal exhibition making and long-ranging potential of the form of publications as containers of image and idea. Each previous chapter of S LOWER F presented site responsive collections that included images, sculptures, textiles, zines, video and sound installation, and artist writings that explore different typological approaches to text; the preface, published late 2023, was an artist project as collection of images and creative writing for The Capilano Review (Vancouver, BC) and considered wild gardens as timekeepers and ancestral connectors, the blurry spaces between virtual homesteading simulations like Stardew Valley and lived experience, setting out a proposed syllabus for the project. This was followed by the interactive installation, The Feeling is Dusk, inhabiting the site of a hotel room at Hybrid Art (Madrid, Spain) in March 2024 surrounding the topic of sleep as a mode of late-capitalist resistance. Next, the gallery exhibition ROOT CELLAR, was presented at Zalucky Contemporary in May 2024 (Toronto, ON) and was inspired by the daily joy and responsibilities of caring for living things as well, glimpses into subterranean worlds, and preoccupations with the somatic implications of storage and inheritance. Most recently ACTIVITY BOOK at The Gibson Museum Simon Fraser University (Burnaby, BC) considered the world-building possibilities of deep looking and open ended play. SEED TRAY is both a culminating and expanding gesture; finding ways to look in multiple directions at the same time.

Maggie Groat is an interdisciplinary artist based in the Niagara region of Ontario, Canada, the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, Chonnonton, and Anishinaabeg. Working exclusively with found imagery and salvaged and sustainable materials, her work explores the utility of images and the transformative, ritual potential of reuse while living in times of climate emergency. Her recent and ongoing multi-chapter project S LOWER F, is a sprawling examination of attempts at slowness as a form of refusal and the transformative potentials of small, quiet acts.