Elizabeth Wyn Wood, R.C.A. (1903 - 1966) Inducted 1966

Elizabeth Wyn Wood, one of Canada's best known women sculptors, was born in Orillia to Mr. and Mrs. E.A. Wood, owners of a large store in town. According to her mother, as a very young child Elizabeth displayed a talent for clay modeling. She studied at the Ontario College of Art and at the Art Students' League in New York. Her many awards included ten scholarships while at the Art College and the Governor-General's Medal. Marriage to her former teacher, Emanuel Hahn, took place in 1926. For twenty-five years, she was an outstanding teacher at Central Technical School in Toronto.

Elizabeth Wyn Wood's work has been rendered in limestone, copper, granite, bronze, marble and white plaster. She is noted for her work in monumental sculpture, especially that of King George VI in Niagara Falls - a ten-foot statue of granite that took eight years to complete. There are many fountains and wall reliefs in parks nearby. Welland boasts her war memorial and Niagara-on-the-Lake her monument of John Graves Simcoe. The fountain in the Fragrant Garden for the Blind in Toronto demonstrated her use of the abstract form to achieve a certain purpose, where the sound of water trickling on the sculpture is more important to the blind than the visual form.

Citizens of Orillia commissioned bronze busts of three of its most important figures - former Premier Leslie Frost, Stephen Leacock and Harold Hale. But she is most widely noted for the series of landscape sculptures, which represent trees, rocks and waters of the Canadian Shield country. A marble bust of the sculptor, herself, by her husband, graces the Orillia Public Library.

A founding member of the Sculptors Society of Canada, she was the Canadian delegate to the first general conference in Paris of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. She is buried in the family plot in St. James' Cemetery in Orillia.