Elizabeth Wyn Wood

Wyn Wood, Elizabeth

 Elizabeth Wyn Wood, sculptor (b at Orillia, Ont 8 Oct 1903; d at Toronto 27 Jan 1966). She made a significant contribution to Canada's cultural life, primarily through her 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 (as organizing secretary 1944-45, chairman of the International Relations Committee 1945-48 and VP 1945-48). Just as the GROUP OF SEVEN (several of whom taught her at the Ontario Coll of Art in the 1920s) translated their experience of the Canadian landscape into paint, Wyn Wood was innovative in expressing similar artistic concerns through fashioning modern materials (notably tin) into pared-down designs composed of juxtaposed masses in space. Her later work shows a greater social concern as she turned to figural subjects and received a number of important major public commissions 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, Ont (1953).