Lithic Life

Lithic Life is a mid-career survey charting Cole Swanson’s research explorations of material geology and pigment-making.   

Just north of Peterborough, the ground holds a rich diversity of minerals. Along the landscape, pockets of glistening mica and saturated ochre rest next to black granite and luminous quartz. These are the oldest earth deposits on the planet, an abundant lithosphere, a Precambrian geological formation pushed to the surface over eons by volcanic, tectonic, and glacial movements. This ancient crust, now pock-marked with mining operations and sliced by dynamite blasted highways, is also the ground for pathways worn by water, traversed by insects, and fed on by flora. Recently, it became a site for an ephemeral mural painted by Swanson with William Kingfisher, a local knowledge keeper, artist, and educator on Indigenous petroglyphs/rock drawings (Chippewas of Rama First Nation, Rama).  

On a rockface along Highway 602, mineral paints of pigment sourced from the land illuminated latent compositions formed by geological processes, infrastructure development, and the activity of flora and fauna over time. These natural fissures and scars of extraction document the legacies of deep time and the region’s ecologies that flourish and perish in the midst of ongoing colonial extraction. Swanson has engaged this research-creation methodology before: in Brazil, Spain, and India, and along the shores of Georgian Bay, ON.   

For twenty years, Swanson has studied the material, ecological, and aesthetic dimensions of minerals. These exploits include rare methods of pigment-making, illuminated miniatures, and eco-artworks grounded in his early training in miniature painting under Dr. Nathulal Verma (Jaipur, Rajasthan, India). This exhibition includes miniatures and panel paintings, documentation of Swanson’s ephemeral murals, and a site-specific painting of natural colours made from the Art Gallery of Peterborough’s building and surrounding land. 

Photo by Annique Monet

Cole Swanson is an artist and educator based in Toronto, Canada. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across Canada and at international venues in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. He is a two-time national fellowship winner through the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute for his research on miniature painting, natural pigments, and fresco techniques in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India.  

Swanson has engaged in a broad material practice using sound, installation, painting, and sculpture to explore interspecies relationships. At the heart of his recent work is a cross-disciplinary exploration of materials and their sociocultural and biological histories. Embedded within art media and commonplace resources are complex relations between nature and culture, humans and other agents, consumers and the consumed.   

Swanson has appeared as author and subject of numerous publications and catalogues, and has guest lectured at academic and arts institutions throughout Canada and abroad. Swanson is a PhD Candidate in Environmental Studies at York University, Toronto. A 2023 Vanier scholar, he is currently engaged in multispecies and artistic research into Toronto’s massive and maligned double-crested cormorant colony.  He is a professor of visual arts in the Faculty of Media, Creative Art, and Design at Humber Polytechnic. 

This project was supported through grants to the artist from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario, and the Toronto Arts Council with funding from the City of Toronto.