Why this artist wanders around Hamilton dressed as a giant duck

Every city has its characters. You know, the people whose quirky, familiar presence have made them a sort of local celebrity. In Halifax, for example, everyone knows Mike the Rose Guy. Ottawans delight at the heavily-decorated, happy-looking Honda that regularly parades its streets. Both Vancouver and Montreal have a famous "spoonman" (though Cyrille, in Montreal, recently retired). These personalities add colour to their hometowns. Sometimes, they can even make a town feel more like a home.

In the past couple years, a new character has joined the pantheon of street life in Hamilton. Of course, he, too, is a bird of a slightly different feather.

Lewis Mallard is a six-foot-tall duck. He can be spotted three or four times a week, roaming Hamilton's lower city. His adventures have garnered a cult following on Instagram. At the beginning of the pandemic, he delivered homemade masks. He's held outdoor art exhibitions around the city's downtown (and given away his paintings) via treasure map. And, earlier this month, he organized "a good old-fashioned duck egg hunt." There are numerous rumours about the bird's identity: some say Lewis is a woman employed by the city to promote public health; others say he's a space alien impersonating a duck. (At least one of these yarns may have been started by Mallard himself.) But, beneath the costume, Lewis Mallard is the alter ego of a local artist who's found that as a duck, he can be something — "a big silly goofball" — that as a rather "shy" and "quiet" human being, he could never be. The way he sees it: Lewis Mallard saves him from himself.

Before moving to Hamilton, Mallard was a semi-established multidisciplinary artist belonging to a reasonably well-known Toronto art collective. When his dad's Alzheimer's worsened, the artist stepped away from art-making and moved to Hamilton to be his full-time caregiver. His father passed away a year and half after he arrived, but Mallard decided to stay in the city. He wanted to set down roots and begin practising art again, but he hadn't yet had the time to make friends or work connections. He needed some way to introduce himself to the community and engage with this place he was deciding to call home.

"Lewis" came to the artist during a magic mushroom trip. On a sunny afternoon, lounging near the rose garden in Gage Park, he saw the nearby bandshell as a gigantic eye, half-submerged, "like there was this sleeping giant underground that needed to be woken up." It was his job to free the giant. When he sketched the character, this cosmic entity assumed an avian shape because the artist's mother had always told him he was an odd duck.

Mallard built his first costume from papier-mâché and chicken wire. He debuted the character during the 2019 Supercrawl — a multi-day art festival that draws hundreds of thousands to Hamilton's James Street North. "People were delighted and confused," he says. "But the biggest thing that happened was totally unexpected: people were looking at me differently.... To have someone look at you completely differently than anyone has ever looked at you in your entire life, it was a strange feeling, and it was powerful." He felt like he wasn't in his own skin anymore. It's a "refreshing" experience, he says, and one that he still looks forward to.

Just about every time he dons his orange Morphsuit and matching Converse high-tops, hauls on the big sculpted body, and ventures out of his studio as Lewis Mallard, he has a nice experience with someone (though he has had trouble with dogs, who are often scared or angered by him, as well as large groups of unsupervised children, which are prone to mobbing). Last summer, nearer the start of the pandemic, Mallard was contacted by a woman whose son has autism and had become extremely germaphobic. He refused to leave the house — but he'd agreed to go outside if Lewis Mallard, who the mother and son watched on social media, visited. The duck-man was happy to help, and the pair breezily went for a walk around the block. More recently, a family pulled their car over on a busy street to ask him for a photo. Lewis Mallard just quacked — as he always does — and the family posed, snapped their picture, said thanks and sped away. In Hamilton, this duck has become the kind of sighting you stop traffic for.

Still, the artist says, Lewis is just learning how to fly. He is exploring what he can do with the character. In March, a Lewis Mallard decoy — a bulletin board dressed as Mallard — popped up across from city hall, like a piece of uncommissioned public art. A Dark Lewis, with all its colours inverted, has been spotted walking around the city. And, in London, Ont., there is reportedly a man-sized goose by the name of Bryan Gosling whose antics aren't terribly dissimilar from Mallard's (coincidentally, the artist's partner attends school in London). Coming up, Lewis Mallard promises more scavenger hunts, more costumes, and as soon as he can find the right space, an exhibition. The duck's only mission is "to get weird and have fun," he says. "And things are only going to get weirder and more fun."