Colleen Wolstenholme: Hyperobjectivity

“Colleen Wolstenholme’s work is cerebral and direct, esoteric and popular, easy to look at and hard to forget.” — Ray Cronin

Colleen Wolstenholme: Hyperobjectivity showcases Wolstenholme’s painting, sculpture, and installations from a career spanning more than thirty years. Taking its name from the idea of the hyperobject — an idea so vast as to exceed ordinary human perception — Colleen Wolstenholme: Hyperobjectivity investigates how we navigate and are shaped by entities such as the weather, capitalism, or even the deep sea. From her copper and sterling silver casts of anti-anxiety medications such as Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, and Valium to her paintings of deep sea life in acrylic and oil, Wolstenholme’s work approaches both the recognizable and, in the words of Laura J. Ritchie, “onceunknowable beings.” Wolstenholme’s art travels widely across genres and styles from representa tional paintings and wearable art to abstraction and large-scale installations. Resisting categorization, her work is fiercely intelligent and often in dialogue with contemporary experience.

Colleen Wolstenholme: Hyperobjectivity will be published to coincide with a major retrospective exhibition organized by the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. The book features more than 75 works by the artist as well as two provocative essays by curators Ray Cronin and Laura J. Ritchie.

Colleen Wolstenholme works across the mediums of jewellery, painting, sculpture, embroidery, and multimedia installation. She received a BFA in sculpture from NSCAD and an MFA focusing on jewellery from the State University of New York at New Paltz. She first attracted attention when she toured with Sarah McLachlan’s Lilith Fair, selling her pill jewellery. Since then, her work has been exhibited in galleries across Canada, as well as in London, UK, and New York, and is held in numerous collections including those of the National Gallery of Canada and Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Born in Nova Scotia, Wolstenholme has lived in Halifax, New York, and Vancouver and is currently Associate Professor of Visual Art at St. Thomas University, Fredericton.

Ray Cronin is a writer, curator, and Director of Exhibitions, Collections and Curatorial Initiatives at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. From 2001 to 2015 he worked at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia as Curator and as Director and CEO. Cronin is a graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, the University of Windsor, and the Getty Museum Leadership Institute. In 2025 he was named a Fellow of the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design. He is the founding curator of the Sobey Art Award and the author of fifteen books on Canadian art.

Laura J. Ritchie is the Director of Institutional Advancement at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. Previously an independent curator and art consultant, she is a fellow of the Getty Leadership Institute and a Mt. Allison and Western University alumna. Former Director of MSVU Art Gallery in Halifax, Laura has worked in collections, exhibitions, and administration with the New Brunswick Museum, New Brunswick Crafts Council, New Brunswick Arts Board, Museum London, Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery, the Commonwealth Association of Museums, Art Gallery of Alberta, and Kelowna Art Gallery. Laura recently co-curated the touring exhibition and edited the publication Sarah Maloney’s Pleasure Ground: A Feminist Take on the Natural World.