Infestation is the appearance of a thousand slugs formed out of ceramic materials and will be installed at the Lachine Canal Historic Peel Basin. As in the garden, their presence recognizes the ambiguity of decay and renewal in the life of the city.

In our gardens we tend to select certain aspects of nature and exclude others. We don’t want slugs in our gardens but they appear there anyway, no matter how hard we try to get rid of them. Nature as we’d like it to be is always overtaken by nature as it is. Slugs are part of nature’s own cycle of decay and renewal. Even as they eat the garden, they are regenerating it.

Until modern science, the sudden appearance of slugs was a sign of the mysterious creative power of nature. It was thought that insects like slugs and worms spontaneously generated out of the decay that they ate. Slugs, frogs, salamanders, and other creatures seemed to suddenly come to life out of putrid marshes and stagnant ponds. Death and decay were necessary for the resurgence of life. We may also see the slugs as symbolic of the efforts of Urban Occupations Urbaines to return cultural fertility to the city’s post-industrial landscape.

The community is invited to join in the installation of Infestation at the Peel Basin Sector of the Lachine Canal National Historic Site beginning at sunrise on September 17^th. The community is invited to return on the afternoon of September 25^th, before sunset, to join in the diffusion of the Infestation into the city by taking the slugs away with them.

Artist Bio

Linda Swanson’s interests are rooted in the metamorphic nature of ceramic materials and processes.  She is particularly interested in how matter takes form and our perception of material over time.  Within the framework of installation and sculpture, she sets up situations in which matter can act according to its own tendencies.  Using processes inherent to fire, water, clay and glaze such as precipitation, evaporation, and dissolution, she explores how matter transforms as it changes states.  Her work engages the enigmatic properties of matter on an elemental level and the capacity of wonder to question how and what we know.

Since 2008, Linda Swanson has been living in Montreal and currently teaches ceramics at Concordia University.  Her work has been exhibited in Canada, across the United States and in Paris,France.  In 2007, she was commissioned for a public art piece in Clichy, France.  She has received awards from the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, the Cattaraugus Arts Council in New York, and National Council on Education in the Ceramic Arts in addition to grants from the Saltonstall Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts.