Artist explores faith through scrap-metal sculpting
Old agricultural equipment left to languish in junkyards or alongside highways gets a second life in Don Engbrecht’s workshop. He has created approximately 200 works over the 20 years he has been sculpting in Boissevain, Man., with scrap metal and welding tools. After seven years, he has finally completed his most recent masterpiece. The project,…
Watch: Winnipeg artist Curtis L. Wiebe is ‘The Imperfectionist’
How do you make a thrift shop come to life? That’s the question dogging Winnipeg artist Curtis L. Wiebe in a 30-minute documentary called The Imperfectionist. Released on TV in Manitoba in 2017 and uploaded to Vimeo this past May, the documentary follows Wiebe as he constructs a corner of a thrift shop that comes…
The ‘poet of ironwork’
If you are Mennonite and live in Alberta, you may not know John Wiebe, but you’ll recognize his work. Kate Janzen calls him the “poet of ironwork.” Every year since 1973, Wiebe has been creating artworks made from scraps of steel and donating them to the annual Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) Alberta Relief Sale. With…
A lifetime of taking pictures
Henry Harms once owned a thousand cameras. He still has a closet full of them. They bear witness to a life-long love of photography. Harms was 9 when he bought his first camera—a Baby Brownie Special. As a boy growing up on a farm near Hague, Sask., he would go to Saskatoon to watch ball…
Langham artist finds connection through painting
Her parents called her Dynamite. Although she didn’t care for the nickname when she was a child, Valerie Wiebe has come to appreciate its layers of meaning. The Langham, Sask., artist says that when she looked up the etymology of “dynamite,” she learned that the prefix “dyna” describes “something with the potential for an explosion…
Exhibit features professor’s paintings of historic Anabaptist sites
A love for the arts, combined with an interest in Anabaptist history, has inspired a professor at Columbia Bible College in Abbotsford to create paintings depicting early Anabaptist history. The exhibit of Gareth Brandt’s water-colour paintings, “Stories of the Anabaptists,” was introduced Sept. 11 at the Mennonite Heritage Museum in Abbotsford. Brandt said that he…
Anna Wiebe challenges herself on sophomore album
Anna Wiebe is on the move again. The singer-songwriter from New Hamburg, Ont., released her second album, All I Do is Move, on July 12, bringing her listeners a more complex album complete with a band backing her strong vocals. Anna Wiebe describes “All I Do Is Move” as “a step up from my last…
Breathing new life into a centuries-old folk art tradition
An Ontario artist is enlivening a Mennonite folk-art tradition that hasn’t been widely practised for more than 150 years. Meg Harder’s six-piece exhibit, “New Fraktur,” draws on the detailed, illuminated calligraphy that was historically produced by early Mennonites and Hutterites, including those who settled in Ontario. She uses fraktur art to bring together her ancestral…
Making art ‘like breathing’ for B.C. illustrator
For Dona Park, making art is the equivalent of eating, sleeping and breathing. She does it every day because she needs to. The 24-year-old attended Goshen (Ind.) College, from which she graduated with a double major in fine arts and history in 2017. She is now a freelance artist based in Abbotsford, B.C., where she…
Pacifism and the art of theatre combat
Jacqueline Loewen just spent the weekend riding a motorcycle as a stunt double for a science-fiction TV show and will be rolling on the ground with strangers tomorrow, choreographing combat for Shakespeare in the Ruins’ production of Hamlet. Jacqueline Loewen. Loewen, 36, is well-versed and well-known in the theatre world. She is an actor, stunt…
