Here, pigment is not the means by which an image is manifested but the image\u2019s core, the sum of its geological identities and the distillation of its ethical elementality. In its boldness, the exhibition\u2019s title is explicit about this: Swanson frames \u201clithic life\u201d as more than a metaphor, as it describes a relationship of more than twenty years with mineral pigments that has taught him that earth is \u201cnot dead matter but quite lively,\u201d and that the work itself has gradually insisted on disrupting the divide between the living and the non-living.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This shift, from colour as affect to colour as material agency, sits at the intersection of new materialist thought and posthuman theory: frameworks in which matter is never inert but dense with histories and forces, and in which artists collaborate with the more-than-human world rather than muting or mastering it. Swanson\u2019s practice enriches this philosophical intersection through a variety of media encompassing painting, photography, and video installations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"Cole-Swanson_LithicLife\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/web_fev_Aloi_Cole-Swanson_LithicLife_02-1.jpg\")
Lithic Life<\/em>, exhibition view, Art Gallery of Peterborough, 2026.
Photo: courtesy of Art Gallery of Peterborough<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
A deeply autobiographical thread links the works in the show: nearly all of the pigments Swanson used are foraged from locations where he has lived or worked. He speaks of their \u201cresonances and differences\u201d as ways of registering the nature of space: materials that bind our bodies to the earth at large. For him, colour is not a transcendental vocabulary of symbolism but a situated earthly lexicon of longing and belonging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The exhibition\u2019s opening gambit is telling. As visitors approach the main gallery, they pass a small constellation of early miniature works\u2014among them Bitter March<\/em> (2006) and selections from Roadside Monuments <\/em>(various dates)\u2014installed near Don\u2019t Go Now<\/em> (2023), an original Indian miniature painting on loan from its maker, the artist Nathu Lal Verma, from whom Swanson learned about pigment-making. His first true encounter with the agency of mineral pigments came through miniature painting in Jaipur, introduced during a university semester abroad and later deepened through a 2007 fellowship with the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Jaipur he learned not only technique but a different tempo of attention: paint made from stone, handmade wasli paper, squirrel-hair brushes, and a mode of making in which every aspect of the art was handmade and had some relationship with the earth. Those early miniatures are presented as an origin story for the show\u2019s central questions: how does one situate oneself beyond the rhetoric and ideologies that have shaped landscape painting in the West? How can one escape the sublime lenses that stage the land as a distant and disconnected backdrop to human vicissitudes rather than envisioning it as an intimate and fraught continuum with them?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bitter March<\/em> emerged when Swanson returned to Canada and tried to reconcile a disparate relationship with the land mediated by the structures and rhythms of commuting and highways. Roadside Monuments<\/em> extends this into a narrative of Canadian distance and infrastructural identity: fictional monuments keyed to the Trans-Canada Highway collapse geographic enormity into the intimate scale of the miniature. These works are small, but the worldview they propose is already expansive: land understood through movement, friction, extraction, and the strange theatre of roadside culture. The main space expands from the miniature to the mural and, with it, from intimate craft to the public surface of the world. A sequence of photographs documents Swanson\u2019s earth murals from Brazil, India, and Spain. In each case, pigments are foraged locally and the murals are intentionally ephemeral, bound with tree sap, honey, and clove, destined to wash away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Swanson\u2019s work, ephemerality isn\u2019t a romantic gesture about the impermanence of life but a material contingent acknowledgment that images, like the cultures that produce them, participate in ecological time. The mural becomes less a picture than a temporary collaboration with pigments: painting as a form of attunement to the elemental dimensions of the planet. This attentiveness is pushed further in two video installations. The Meandering Light (Wawasekona)<\/em> (2024) is rooted in the Canadian Shield, which is among the oldest exposed geological formations on Earth, a landscape worn down into outcrops dense with mineral abundance. In the Georgian Bay project, he traces the ribboned patterns of Precambrian gneiss. Here, mural painting is reclaimed from its political and religious histories as a method for noticing, a choreography that retrains perception toward multispecies co-presence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The other video installation, Communicating with Split, Remembering Connections<\/em> (2025), a collaboration with William Kingfisher of the Chippewas of Rama First Nation, documents the making of a mural that engages with the geological time of rocks exposed by the highway cut near Apsley, Ontario. As they trace crevices, cracks, and outlines, Swanson and Kingfisher appear engulfed in the process of sharing a lithic wisdom of displacement and nativeness that words cannot fully express.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Among the works on show, the most incisive gesture may be the turn inward toward the gallery itself as quarry. Beside the documentation and videos sits a cluster of small flasks containing unrefined mineral pigments spanning from Jaipur to the Canadian Shield: a deconstructed, miniaturized landscape of disparate geographies materially present in one site. Crucially, two refined whites, \u201cCube white\u201d and \u201cFoundation white,\u201d derived from the Art Gallery of Peterborough building, are gathered in bowls. They come from small extractions from the building\u2019s foundation and a nearby wall where a hole made by Swanson is in full sight: an unceremonious breach of the pure perfection embodied by the modernist gallery space. If modernism tries to pretend that the gallery is an immaculate vacuum, Swanson insists on its material temporality as mineral sedimentation: the conception of geology is expanded to the institutional and the built environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n land\/form <\/em>(2026), <\/em>a large board sitting on the gallery floor, is a proclamation of painterly earthliness. It frames raw minerality as a present-tense, radical gesture within the histories of abstraction. Sprawling as an open ended, arabesque-like accumulation of mineral, the work rejects the wall as painting\u2019s only proper address\u2014something that artists such as Jackson Pollock ultimately weren\u2019t able to resist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The exhibition\u2019s final movement returns to intimacy through the Meditations <\/em>series (2020\u2013ongoing) of hand-prepared mineral colours on wasli. The series began during the pandemic as Swanson felt urged to return to the intimacy of the small format: a concentrated space for abstraction as a kind of slow unfolding. In this grouping, the complexity of his project is clearly manifested: not a return to transcendence in the old romantic key, but a careful demonstration of how mythic and devotional forms can be re-founded on elemental matter. Even when figuration is alluded to, as in the Eurphrosyne, Aglaea, and Thalia of the Graces<\/em> (2023\u201324) triptych, the real subject remains grounded in mineral time, the slow pressure of the earth\u2019s chromatic archive. What Lithic Life<\/em> ultimately offers is an ethic of painting for the Anthropocene that rejects spectacle, ecological alarmism, and political denunciation. Swanson\u2019s earth is not sublime in the nineteenth-century sense, either. It never returns to an overwhelming elsewhere before which the human dwindles. It is close, compromised, wounded by extraction and yet still insistently vibrant, alive, and hopeful. If materials carry geological, political, and colonial histories, then to paint with foraged pigment is to acknowledge that all forms of artmaking are materially entwined with<\/em> those histories, not merely about them, opening the very idea of art making onto an expanded field of responsibility and potentiality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Art Gallery of Peterborough<\/strong>![\"Cole-Swanson_Bitter](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/web_fev_Aloi_Cole-Swanson_Bitter-March-scaled.jpg\")
Bitter March<\/em>, 2006.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Cole-Swanson_TheMeanderingLight\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/web_fev_Aloi_Cole-Swanson_TheMeanderingLight.jpg\")
The Meandering Light (Wawasekona)<\/em>, 2024.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Cole-Swanson_CommunicatingwithSplit\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/web_fev_Aloi_Cole-Swanson_CommunicatingwithSplit-scaled.jpg\")
Communicating with Split, Remembering Connections<\/em>, 2025.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Cole-Swanson_LithicLife\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/web_fev_Aloi_Cole-Swanson_LithicLife_04.jpg\")
Lithic Life<\/em>, exhibition view, Art Gallery of Peterborough, 2026.
Photo: courtesy of Art Gallery of Peterborough<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/br>January 17\u2013March 29, 2026<\/br><\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":274828,"template":"","categories":[131,884,503,892],"numeros":[],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[932],"artistes":[7987],"thematiques":[],"type_compte-rendu":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-274835","1":"compte-rendu","2":"type-compte-rendu","3":"status-publish","4":"has-post-thumbnail","5":"hentry","6":"category-compte-rendu","7":"category-reviews","8":"category-webzine","10":"auteurs-giovanni-aloi-en","11":"artistes-cole-swanson-en"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/compte-rendu\/274835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/compte-rendu"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/compte-rendu"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/274828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274835"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=274835"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=274835"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=274835"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=274835"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=274835"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=274835"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=274835"},{"taxonomy":"type_compte-rendu","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_compte-rendu?post=274835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}