Lithic Life

January 17, 2026 – March 29, 2026
Art Gallery of Peterborough

Lithic Life is a mid-career survey of Cole Swanson’s long-running fascination with geology as both subject and source. The exhibition traces two decades of research into mineral matter, pigment-making, and the uneasy relationship between landscape, extraction, and image.

Just north of Peterborough, the land offers up a startling mineral vocabulary: glinting mica, bruised ochres, black granite, quartz that seems to catch and hold light. This is ancient ground, part of a Precambrian formation forced upward through volcanic, tectonic, and glacial upheaval over vast spans of time. It is also a landscape marked by intervention—mining cuts, blasted highways, and the familiar blunt-force signatures of human industry. Yet even under that pressure, the land remains active: crossed by water, insects, roots, and slow natural processes that continue to write their own compositions on the surface.

It is within this tension that Swanson works. For a recent ephemeral mural on a rock face along Highway 620, he collaborated with William Kingfisher of Chippewas of Rama First Nation, an artist and curator whose engagement with image-making on the land carries both cultural and historical depth. Using mineral paints sourced from the site itself, the work responded to fissures, scars, and accidental markings already present in the stone. Rather than impose an image on the landscape, the mural seemed to coax one out of it.

That approach has shaped much of Swanson’s practice, whether in Brazil, Spain, India, or along Georgian Bay. Across these projects, he treats pigment not merely as a medium but as a material with memory—something dug from the earth, altered by hand, and returned to the surface as image. His works sit at an interesting crossroads: part ecological inquiry, part devotional craft, part excavation of the aesthetics of place.

The exhibition gathers miniature paintings, panel works, documentation of ephemeral murals, and a site-specific painting made from natural colours derived from the Art Gallery of Peterborough and its surrounding grounds. There is a quiet ambition to the whole project. Lithic Life asks viewers to consider not just what a painting depicts, but what it is made of, where those materials come from, and what histories—geological, ecological, colonial—remain embedded in the colour itself.

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