The Willful Plot brings together artists' practices to expand the notion of the garden as a site of tension between wild and cultivated, temporal and perpetual, public and private, sovereign and colonized. Here, the garden is considered by the artists not only as a delineated patch of earth, but as a story and a will to drive that story to complicate the way in which cultures and individuals see themselves in relation to ecology, sociality, belief and possibility. It is an opportunity to look at human relationships with land, flora, fauna and their interrelatedness. In its willfulness, the resistance garden is a counter-site, a heterotopia for alternative cultivation and potential transformation.

The Willful Plot brings together artists’ practices to expand the notion of the garden as a site of tension between wild and cultivated, temporal and perpetual, public and private, sovereign and colonized. This online Reading Room includes texts expanding on different notions of the garden and more-than-human relationships, as well as the political implications of thinking willfully, with and alongside.

Jana Tyner

Join us for a series of lectures at the Belkin. We invite Jane Wolff, Desirée Valaderes and Sara Jacobs to address The Willful Plot.

Join us for a concert by the UBC Contemporary Players directed by Paolo Bortolussi and teaching assistant Ramsey Sadaka in a program that celebrates the Belkin’s current exhibition The Willful Plot.

As The Willful Plot invites us to consider sites of tension through an expanded notion of the garden, Sound Plots considers these intersections of site, human and nonhuman ecologies through sound.

Join Glenn Lewis for a discussion of his work in The Willful Plot along with curator Melanie O'Brian. Over five decades, Glenn Lewis has photographed and created gardens in an investigation of paradisial symbolism.