A Famous Canadian sculptor, Elizabeth Wyn Wood, was born in Orillia on October 8, 1903. She made a significant contribution to Canada's cultural life, primarily through modernist interpretation of the Canadian landscape in sculpture, but also through teaching at Central Technical School, Toronto, and through her involvement with the Federation of Canadian Artists and the Canadian Arts Council, in which she was organizing secretary from 1944-45, and chairman and vice-president of the International Relations Committee from 1945-48. In 1926 she married another famous Canadian sculptor, Emanuel Hahn.
Just as the Group of Seven (several of
whom taught her at the Ontario College of Art in the 1920s)
expressed their love for the Canadian landscape by painting,
Wyn Wood was innovative in expressing similar artistic
concerns through fashioning modern materials, such as tin,
into pared-down designs composed of juxtaposed masses in
space. Among her famous works are "Munitions
Worker" and "Gesture".
Her later work shows a greater social concern as
she turned to figural subjects and received a number of important
major public sculpturing in Ontario, such as the Welland-Crowland War
Memorial (1934-39), fountains and panels in the Rainbow Bridge
Gardens (1940-41), a monument to King George VI (1963) at Niagara
Falls, and the Simcoe Memorial at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario
(1953).
