John McEwen

Terrence Paris is Public Services Librarian at Mount St. Vincent
University in Halifax.

Each title in the Canadian Artists Series focuses on a Canadian
artist’s work as revealed in reproductions and interviews. Lind
interviewed McEwen, a sculptor.

In 1972, McEwen, who trained at the Ontario College of Art, purchased
the blacksmith shop in Hillsdale, Ontario, to use as a studio. He
studied welding and taught himself blacksmithing, and these skills are
evident in his sculptures. Using an acetylene torch, he cuts still
silhouettes of animals (dogs and wolves are his favorite subjects) and
places them in interior and exterior spaces that are used as extensions
of the sculptures themselves. In a representative assemblage called
Western Channel, created for the University of Lethbridge, McEwen had a
solid-steel wall 24 metres long erected on the roof. The wall’s top
edge evokes the gentle undulations of the surrounding Prairie landscape.
In the middle of the wall is a doorway. Two cutouts, a wolf and a German
shepherd, are oriented toward the door—the wolf moving forward, the
dog seeming to pause. As Lind explains it, the sculpture should be read
as a metaphor: the wall is the terrain, while the door represents the
university, which is a crossroads of the human and animal.

The illustrations, with Lind’s commentary, do much to stimulate
interest in McEwen’s work. However, for pieces this site-specific,
there is really no substitute for a direct encounter in the place for
which they were created: the Alberta Prairie, the shoreline of the
Ottawa River, the grounds of the Banff Centre.

The book reproduces, but does not explain, a recent project that
appears to be a new direction for McEwen: a room with stainless steel
walls and a bronze floor, designed as The Royal Canadian Air Force Hall
of Tribute for the National Aviation Museum in Ottawa.