by Hillary Titley

A tour of downtown Dartmouth and Halifax can provide a generous survey of artist Dawn MacNutt’s work. From Alderney Landing to Peace and Friendship Park to the atrium of the IWK Health Centre, MacNutt’s woven fibre (often willow) sculptures, cast in bronze, have dotted HRM for four decades. Coinciding with a Winter 2025 retrospective show at the MSVU Art Gallery, comes Timeless Forms, an autobiographical art book of MacNutt’s life, relationships and creative practice. “When I am creating,” she tells us, “my love of people is my richest collaborator.”

Conversational writing from MacNutt and archival photographs of her work tell us her artistic story, spanning from the WWII-era Nova Scotia of her childhood and the Fine Arts Department of Mount Allison University in the 1950s, to the roadsides and ditches of Little Harbour, NS, where the willow she weaves into her present-day sculptures grows wild. “I am fascinated by posture, gait, and nuances of facial expression,” she writes, outlining a persistent motif in her sculpture pieces: lifelike forms pitching either forward or back, conveying a bold sense of emotion and vitality.  If the completed work represents uncanny presence, MacNutt reveals that the source of her artistic inspiration is often equally unknowable, saying, “the mystery of the [creative] decision is part of the pleasure.”

Of a 2022 proposal for putting a two-metre-high woven work through the time- and money- intensive bronze casting process, MacNutt cheekily writes, “[a]t eighty-seven, I’m in my ‘now or never’ era!” Though in part, a memoir of a long life, Timeless Forms gracefully sidesteps a now-or-never urgency, instead luxuriating in the opportunity to hear directly from the elder MacNutt about the circle of influence linking her experiences, her “love of people” and her artistic process. The archival photographs and corresponding stories are beautifully paired, with images of exhibitions and artworks always close at hand to accompany events and thoughts described in the text.

If one is unable to discover MacNutt’s public artworks in person, Timeless Forms offers a comparable space to contemplate her output. “Reflecting on my work, I realize that both the muse and the act of musing, have been central to my process for decades,” she writes. The opportunity to receive or chase inspiration is something that MacNutt and Timeless Forms takes seriously.

After a 2024 retrospective at the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown, PE, comes Erica Rutherford: Her Lives and Works, edited by the Centre’s curator Pan Wendt. The book, containing both English and French text (the English was evaluated for this review), is a critical anthology on the life and career of Erica Rutherford, a multidisciplinary artist who practiced internationally before eventually settling on Prince Edward Island. Born in 1923 in the UK (d. 2008), Rutherford was a WWII-generation trans woman, and the book’s contributors map Rutherford’s life within her historical context alongside the ongoing conversation between her lived experiences and her artistic creations.

A detailed biographical essay of Rutherford by Wendt opens the book, and excerpts of interviews between Wendt and Rutherford’s surviving partner and fellow artist, Gail, offer glimpses of the nuts-and-bolts decisions that go into sustaining an artistic life. (Of a car purchase, Gail says,“We bought that car because it would take the [large] painting size.”) Rutherford’s unique life story provides the inspiration for contributors to articulate notions on her art, her times and her legacy.

Of her filmmaking efforts, Wendt notes the “colonial logic” of the 1949 film, African Jim, for which Rutherford, who is white, served as producer; while film historian Peter Davis agrees, he also notes the boldness of a Black South African story made under apartheid.

If we call African Jim an example of dated audacity, the term can also be applied to some of the criticism contained within Erica Rutherford’s pages. Ray Cronin, who curated Rutherford’s solo show, The Human Comedy, in 1998, writes, “[Rutherford’s] profound sense of being the wrong gender had kept her unsettled throughout her life,” articulating trans experience as an internal error that must be corrected.  In her essay, Eva Hayward, a Rutherford scholar, claims that gender is an assigned “naturalization” process, and to be trans is to actively reject that process—a notable departure from the passive language of Cronin’s framing.

In 2025, when trans rights, care and dignity are under threat, it is audacious to publish Erica Rutherford: Her Lives and Works. The courage of trans artists of all generations is a generous portal of exploration and discovery for all existing across the gender spectrum. ■

HILLARY TITLEY is a white, cis-woman sharing her home in Dartmouth with a cis-male spouse and two cats.