Cole Swanson's gold-plated art will make you think twice before you squash that housefly

When artist Cole Swanson leaves the house, he often travels with empty pill bottles and containers just in case he encounters a specimen — but he's also been known to just bring the dead bugs home with him in his hands.

A few years ago, for instance, when populations were near record low, he found a dead Monarch butterfly in downtown Toronto. He carried it to his studio like it was the most precious thing on the planet, he says — like it were gold. His eyes instinctively sweep the sidewalk now for the glint of a wing or a carapace. Once you begin to look, he tells me, you'll find them everywhere.

The 36-year-old's art illuminates the complex non-human biosystems we rub up against each day. Whether we know them as product or pest (which tend to be the ways we categorize the creatures that enter and share our immediate spaces), he's interested in how we affect these organisms — and how they affect us, too. His work includes stuff like cow hides, bone char and various natural pigments. He's fascinated, he says, "in the stories about our relationships with the natural world embedded within these materials." He's begun to see them less as his media and more as his collaborators. For the past few years, he's worked especially close with insects. The latest such project features 250 bodies covered in a thin layer of 24 karat gold in a process known as gilding. The installation currently occupies a main wall at Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa as part of the exhibition Glimmers of the Radiant Real.

Swanson began his work with bugs after looking up at a light fixture in his apartment and noticing the constellation of expired houseflies that had gathered there. He went around his building photographing all of the different groupings he found. In every fixture, a new constellation. It was like looking at the stars of the night sky, he says; each bore evidence of the other worlds all around us.

He then started working with the bodies, applying traditional gilding techniques he'd learnt while studying miniature painting in India. What's typically desecrated — squashed, swatted or balled up in a tissue and flushed down the toilet — he's chosen to honour. He uses the gold to accentuate the pleasing architecture of their forms. On one, it's a smooth plate of armour; on another, it's the lacework made by the veins of its wing. The gesture is intended to encourage empathy for this thing — be it a blowfly or a ladybug — that we generally feel so little for. It does something bigger, too: it asks us to notice, to consider and to respect what else is living in the spaces we inhabit.

Comprised of wasps, bees, cicadas, beetles, numerous fly species and a green darner dragonfly, Monument is the largest installation of gilt insects Swanson has presented so far. It is the culmination of five years of collecting. The specimens are stuck into the wall by their entomological pins and mapped into groups plotted around where their bodies were found. He points out a dense line of houseflies beneath the large dragonfly: "That's my mother-in-law's patio door in Combermere, Ontario." Another spot might be a particular light fixture or a window sill in his apartment. He's connected each of the insects with gold thread tied around the pins to emphasize the 12 different maps he's marked. And the maps themselves are loosely joined together, making an incomplete atlas of the many microverses that the artist lives around. Radiating from each insect, the threads appear as beams of golden light, like a religious icon — which makes the sense of interconnection feel almost spiritual. In fact, he transports the specimens packed carefully in an ornamented bamboo tea box, which, he says, feels like he's carrying a reliquary. Each of the 250 bodies is treated like a sacred object.

At his home studio, he shows me how one goes about gilding something so small and delicate. From a container filled with a solution to preserve the bodies and make them more pliable, Swanson's selected a carpenter bee that feels "ready" and has stretched opened and flattened its forewings. He pierces it through the thorax with a pin, then begins to apply a water-based glue-size in a thin, even coat over the bee's wings using a fine squirrel hair brush. Once the glue is sufficiently tacky, he takes a leaf of gold and cuts it to size with a gilder's knife. The metal is so thin it moves like liquid. Even a breath could tear it, Swanson tells me. He lays the gold over the surface of the wing with a pair of tweezers, then strengthens the connection and trims the excess with another tiny brush. He burnishes it gently and holds it up to the light for inspection.

The gold brings out the wings' purple tones, we notice. It looks like a piece of quartz or garnet or some other gemstone. "It's gorgeous," Swanson says. Incredible that he found this jewel just lying outside the front door of his family home. And to think there are more just like it around us all the time.

See more images from Monument:

Cole Swanson's artwork is included in the exhibition Glimmers of the Radiant Real, on view at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa through September 9, 2018.