The Bedroom and Kitchen and Garden School of Art

is a home/studio project of Francesca Bennett, permanent resident of the School since 2010.

(It is also a broadsheet that hasn't happened yet.)

hosted vivienne bessette in the studio from July 7 to August 15, 2026.

vivienne bessette is an artist who describes their works—crossing and spanning drawings, sculptures, texts, decompositions, plantings, installations, and interspecies co-creations—as clustered around 3 nodes of practice:

The first node is defined by multimodal collaborations that give rise to shared infrastructures, often embedded in and around collective gardens: Looking at the Garden Fence (2021) and Garden Don’t Care (2019-2023) convened 23 and 9 artists respectively around gardens as sites of public rehearsal; the collaborative installation Freon (2015-2023) was exhibited in The Willful Plot at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (2023).

The second node engages the poetics of plant life in site-based interventions, rhyming with documentation for the exhibition space. Past projects at dreams comma delta (2022), Treasure Hill Taipei Artist Village (2023), and Stadium Projects (2025), have been activated by neighbourhood walks and waterings, aquaculture mapping, micro algae farm visits, and ephemeral sculptures at river crossings.

The third node experiments with embedded, place-based inquiry at ecological time scale. A plot-tender for over a decade at the commons garden at Sahalli Garden, their current research roots down in rural Manitoba through work with community pastures and seed farming for native grassland restoration.

During their residency, vivienne began a poetic process of generating correspondence with various governing bodies in the prairies of Manitoba, where they learned and planted at a native seed orchard in the spring (2026), and where they will return for harvest in the fall (2026). In the studio, their textual seedbed preparation reached toward the gaps between language, law, and relations, and how they live in, on, and with, the land. A small gathering with OHCE-ECHO will be organized next spring (2027).

hosted philios reading room and poetry reading out loud at ECHO-ECHO from May 21 to June 21, 2026.

poetry reading out loud is a semi-public project, inviting people to read poetry out loud together, and philios reading room is a mutable condition, requiring seats, drinks, snacks, texts, air, green, light, and, ideally, good company.

At ECHO-ECHO the two together sounded something like this:

hosted Slaylor Moon at home in July 2022.

Slaylor Moon is the experimental electronic solo project of Sydney Koke, an interdisciplinary artist and experimental musician and composer now working between Paris, Leeds, and Savary Island. As artist-in-residence at the School at home, Sydney experimented with new music equipment and worked on her second solo album, a follow up to Zone of Pure Resistance (Maple Death Records, 2019).

hosted poetry reading out loud at home, in public parks, and online, from 2017 to 2022, and again in 2024, and again in 2026.

poetry reading out loud is a semi-public project that invites people to read poetry out loud together.