The Wyllieum - a gallery celebrating the work and legacy of the artist George Wyllie
The Wyllieum is a new art gallery in the heart of Greenock.
George Wyllie (1921 – 2012) burst onto the art scene in the early 1980s, after a career working on the Clyde. Friendships with leading artists Jospeh Beuys and George Rickey and support from art world luminaries Barbara Grigor and Richard Demarco helped to establish Wyllie as an artist with something to say.
Born in Glasgow, Wyllie spent most of his working life in Gourock. He first trained as an engineer with the Post Office before serving in the Royal Navy from 1942 to 1946. He was a Customs and Excise Officer in Greenock for thirty years before becoming a full-time artist in his late fifties.
The Wyllieum is a new art gallery in the heart of Greenock.
George Wyllie (1921 – 2012) burst onto the art scene in the early 1980s, after a career working on the Clyde. Friendships with leading artists Jospeh Beuys and George Rickey and support from art world luminaries Barbara Grigor and Richard Demarco helped to establish Wyllie as an artist with something to say.
Born in Glasgow, Wyllie spent most of his working life in Gourock. He first trained as an engineer with the Post Office before serving in the Royal Navy from 1942 to 1946. He was a Customs and Excise Officer in Greenock for thirty years before becoming a full-time artist in his late fifties.
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NewsTranscript
00:30Hi, I'm Will Cooper, I'm the Inaugural Director at the Wileyum, a new art gallery in Greenock
00:50celebrating the work and legacy of artist George Wiley.
00:54Why is George Wiley so special?
00:55So George is a really interesting figure, he was born in Glasgow but spent most of his
01:00life living in Goorook and working in Greenock where we are now.
01:03As a young man he served in the Second World War but he spent most of his working life
01:08as a customs and excise officer working on the Clyde, checking in and checking out products
01:13and items that were being traded on the river.
01:16He worked about 100 yards away from where we're stood now in the customs office down
01:19the road and lived at the top of the hill in Goorook so we're really in the place that
01:24was really key to George and it's really exciting to be able to open an arts organisation
01:29that celebrates that legacy in the place that was so important to him.
01:33When did he start thinking about making art?
01:37So when he started thinking about making art is a tricky question.
01:41George was born in 1921 and from a young age started playing the ukulele, started playing
01:46the double bass, he would sing, he and his brother Banks would perform, so he was clearly
01:52an artistic, creative person but because of circumstance and life and the world being
01:57an artist wasn't a thing as a young man that was open to him.
02:02So like I say he joined the post office originally and worked in the post office, he then joined
02:09the military effort in the Second World War and served in the Navy.
02:12He then came back to Scotland, married, had a family, worked at the customs office and
02:18retired in his mid-fifties and the story goes, whether it is true or not, we can all
02:23decide for ourselves, that upon leaving the customs office on his last day he declared
02:28that now was the time for art.
02:30He made a ten sculpture plan that he would make ten sculptures, should he like one of
02:36those ten sculptures, so he would then dedicate the rest of his life to being an artist.
02:40Lo and behold he liked all ten of them, a couple of which we have on display in the
02:43museum here.
02:44So at that stage, about 55, 60, he sort of shifted from his, air quotes, professional
02:50life to his creative life and then made work pretty compulsively up until when he died
02:57when he was 90.
02:58Who was he making this work?
02:59So he made the work, but underneath the family home, so family and home and that familiarity
03:05is really, really important to the work I think, but he didn't have a studio in the
03:09traditional sense of going to the studio, he didn't go to art school and have that
03:13formal training, but the studio was in the basement to the family home.
03:17So you get lovely stories from the estate now which is run by George's dear daughter
03:21Louise about there being sculptures everywhere, about there being bits of metal being worked
03:26on, there was always sculpture in the garden, George was always off down to the river to
03:31borrow some materials, get them back home, weld things, chop them up.
03:36There's a great phrase that he used that he was trained whilst in the Navy in the war
03:40to engineer anything and you can see that in all the work that he clearly wasn't afraid
03:45of materials.
03:46We have works here that are made of steel, that are bits of stone made into a train,
03:50we have playing with ideas of what birds are with bird feathers attached to rocks.
03:55He wasn't afraid of trying new stuff and making things out of new things, it was about
04:00how can I deliver a message and what tools are at my disposal to deliver that message
04:06and then he sort of did what he wanted to I think.
04:09He wasn't attached to a market, he didn't have gallery representation like an artist
04:14with a museum like this might do now.
04:16He sold lots of works whilst he was alive and he worked in a way where he made lots
04:22of public commissions so people might know the ubiquitous chip, the restaurant in Glasgow
04:26that he designed the logo for and did some of the interiors.
04:29There are spots like that all over Glasgow where he took on a public commission.
04:34The Buchanan Galleries, the shopping centre has a giant spire like the ones in our opening
04:39show.
04:40If we could fit it in the building we might have tried to get it in the exhibition.
04:43So he clearly identified ways that he could make a few quid by being an artist.
04:47Selling the work on the market might not have been one of those ways but he was pragmatic.
04:52He was friends with, personally who I would say is probably the best artist of the last
04:56hundred years, Joseph Beuys, who had this incredible ability to get history and feeling
05:01into inanimate objects.
05:04You can see the pivotal moment where George met Beuys and how the work shifted in the
05:09material language and the visual language that he was using.
05:12So he learned all the time.
05:13How much of his work was inspired by the clades?
05:16But I would argue with George that because of who he was, his attachment to the river
05:21that you can see in the way that he wrote to Daphne whilst he was at war, where he lived,
05:26how he chose to work, what he did as a career, the river never was far away from him.
05:31He was paid to monitor what came in and out and he, from quite a young age, articulated
05:39really clearly that it isn't just stuff in boxes that comes in and out.
05:43It's people, it's ideas, it's customs, it's other cultures, it's all of the good stuff
05:50in life comes in and out of places and doesn't stay the same.
05:54And I think you can make a pretty strong argument that that idea of ebbing and flowing and things
05:59changing, that's what's in every single artwork that George made.
06:03George wrote a really, one of his really amazing works was a play that he wrote called A Day
06:07Down the Gold Mine, first performed in 1981, I think, that warned of the inequalities that
06:14the modern banking system that was being rolled out by Thatcher and Reagan at the time was
06:18going to have.
06:19And that was about the ebb and flow of wealth and how in this new banking system, it would
06:23flow in one direction and it would not ebb down to the rest of us.
06:26And he saw that in 1980, and George saw that with banking, he saw it with the climate crisis,
06:32he saw it with European colonisation of the rest of the world.
06:36He was having these conversations about what that unchecked ebb and flow, and I think he
06:40would have argued that the Europeans probably ebbed a bit too far, didn't let enough of
06:44that flow come back the other way, but that would come back and bite us.
06:48And lo and behold, he was right about that too.
06:52You can sort of take quite a lot of these ideas and put them to other different political
06:57moments, different social moments, and that's what the best art can do, is it can be a way
07:01that we frame how we think about the world around us.
07:04He liked work that was in the public realm.
07:07He loved this idea that you didn't have a choice but be confronted by his work.
07:11The straw locomotive, which maybe is his most famous work, which was this sort of funerary
07:16icon for the lack of industry on the Clyde, a life-size replica of a locomotive train
07:23made out of straw hanging from the Finistern crane, he would talk about that being successful
07:27because you didn't have a choice.
07:28If you lived in Glasgow, that was there for six weeks, you saw it.