PEOPLE are being invited to share their stories about the work of Scottish artist and writer George Wyllie as his family prepares to mark this year’s centenary of his birth.
Their recollections will be used to help create a new online map detailing the Glasgow-born artist’s public – and not-so-public – sculptures.
The Mapping Memories project went live on Hogmanay, which would have been Wylie’s 99th birthday. He died in 2012 at the age of 90. As well as tracking his public and collected works, it aims to include the locations and details of his major temporary installations, such as the Straw Locomotive (1987) and the Paper Boat (1989) which now exist only in memory and archive material.
Through the year leading up to Wyllie’s 100th birthday this coming Hogmanay, the George Wyllie Estate will welcome public contributions and will publish previously unseen material from the artist’s own archive. People are being invited to contribute their stories about Wyllie’s work at www.georgewyllie.com, which will also allow audio or video recordings, text, photos and film, as well as the all-important geographical location of the work they are posting about. A second blog on the website – Just For Fun – asks people to share the ways in which Wyllie inspired them to get creative.
The artist’s elder daughter, Louise Wyllie, said it would form a permanent marker of her father’s “out-and-about” approach to art, which took him across the UK and beyond.
“My father used to say that his definition of public art was art the public couldn’t avoid and there are hundreds of sculptures, installations and artworks out there; some of which we know about, like the Running Clock in Glasgow, and others which were temporary, such as his most famous artworks; the Straw Locomotive and the Paper Boat,” she said.
“The Paper Boat started its voyage in Glasgow in 1989 and ended up ’sailing’ via Ayr, Dumfries, London and Antwerp and on to New York in 1990. It even made it onto the front cover of the Wall Street Journal under the headline: "Laugh You May, but Remember It’s Floating and the Titanic Isn’t."
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