Those in Glass Houses...

Michelle Wilson

Forest City Gallery, 1025 Elias St.

May 28 – July 23, 2026

Opening Reception: Thursday, May 28, 2026 @ 7–9pm

This work began with a family story I could not let go of, and deepened through the act of trying to tell that story to my child. In 1911, my grandfather and great-uncle were sent to Canada as British Home Children—removed from their families at the ages of nine and ten and placed into a system that positioned them as surplus, transforming their bodies into capital for the colonial state. As I traced their histories, I began to think alongside another movement: the global circulation of plants through imperial greenhouse systems. Both operated through logics of transfer, cultivation, and control—lives uprooted, renamed, and reorganized to serve distant economies and imperial ideologies.

Those in Glass Houses… holds these histories together.

The installation takes the form of a greenhouse constructed from quilted, fused recycled plastics. I chose these materials deliberately—discarded, fragile, and ubiquitous—and, through sustained attention and care, transformed them into a structure that holds and diffuses light. The form echoes both stained glass and colonial greenhouse architecture—spaces that are at once protective and disciplinary. It is a site where care and exploitation blur.

Inside, plants grow. Some are medicinal species often dismissed as weeds—plantain, motherwort, dead nettle—plants that arrived with settlers and have persisted in disturbed soils. Others are native species, grounded in place. These plantings were developed in collaboration with Taíno-Métis horticulture specialist Laura Ramirez-Sanchez, and they sit in tension with one another, asking what it means to belong, to be naturalized, to be out of place.

Sound moves through the installation, activated by touch. When you reach toward the plants, your body triggers a poem that unfolds in fragments, carried across voices, my own and my child’s. This is important to me—that this story does not end with inheritance as burden alone, but continues as something shaped, interrupted, and reimagined across generations.

I understand this work as a kind of counter-archive—not one that corrects history with a single narrative, but one that holds complexity, contradiction, and feeling. This exhibition is, in many ways, about learning how to hold fragility differently. Not as weakness, but as a condition that asks for attention, responsibility, and care that does not repeat the violences it seeks to heal.

Artist Bio:

Michelle Wilson is a queer, neurodivergent artist and mother living as an uninvited guest in Guelph, Ontario. Her practice approaches artistic collaboration as a form of anti-colonial care work. Rather than centring the myth of the individual artist, she works through enmeshed networks—creating conditions for many hands, stories, and ways of knowing to gather through shared creation.

She is a founding member of the Coves Collective and the Unsettling Conservation Collective. Working across textile, ceramics, and new media, her projects explore relationality, land, memory, and collective responsibility. She is currently an Assistant Professor teaching in the School of Fine Art and Music and in the Bachelor of Creative Arts, Health & Wellness program at the University of Guelph.

Join us for a workshop with Michelle and Candace Dube on Saturday, July 4th, 2026. Details to follow.

Thank you to our funders the London Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts and the London Community Foundation for their support to make our exhibitions and programming free and accessible for all.