“Sculptress Interprets Land’s Spirit”: Elizabeth Wyn Wood, the Group of Seven, and analogy as equivalence

Abstract

Canadian sculptor Elizabeth Wyn Wood (1903–66), best known for her modernist landscape sculptures, has since the inception of her artistic career been compared, through analogy, with the Group of Seven (fl. 1920–33), Canada’s enduringly famous and overtly nationalistic collective of modernist landscape painters. Critics claimed that Wood “achieved for sculpture what the Group of Seven achieved for painting” and, occasionally, invoked specific Group artists, dubbing Wood the “Lawren Harris of sculpture.” Analogizing across disciplines, the Wood/Group likening appears to posit a formal comparison in gendered language: the Group’s bold, decorative portrayals of the northern Ontario “wilderness” find clear visual comparands in Wood’s abstracted compositions of the same region. In this article, however, I demonstrate that the apparently visual basis for the comparison is inextricable from the textual discourse fundamental to Canadian art in the early twentieth century and beyond; it is only through analyzing this discourse that an understanding of the Wood/Group analogy can be reached. The Group ostensibly pioneered the first genuine Canadian landscape aesthetic; through immersing himself in the land, the mythology went, the Canadian artist learned to paint Canada on its own terms. This landscape artist-as-woodsman myth was a form of settler indigenization by which Canada laid cultural claim to colonized land. Analogy frames Wood as not an epigone but an equal of the Group: in producing organically, anew, a genuine Canadian landscape aesthetic for sculpture, Wood “achieved for sculpture what the Group of Seven achieved for painting”—its deployment as a medium in the service of Canada’s land claim.