00:00I'm Billy Sutherland, I'm General Manager here at the Wylium.
00:03So this is the second exhibition that the Wylium's hosting since we opened in April of this year.
00:09The title of the exhibition is A Wee Multitude of Questions, Sculpture by George Wylie.
00:13The title was taken from Liz Lockhead's poem.
00:16What we're seeing here now is more of a retrospective of objects that he made.
00:22He would play with works in a light-hearted way to entertain himself and others,
00:27but the playfulness captures the imagination and allows you then to deliver these more serious messages
00:34that are contained within the exhibition.
00:36The concept behind Wylium has been going on since 2013.
00:40It was very important for us to be by the Clydes because George had a deep affinity with the water,
00:47having been in the Royal Navy and then in the Customs Service,
00:51and he lived on the hill overlooking the same view that we have here.
00:55Yet to be contradicted, but the view that we have from the gallery is unrivalled in the country,
01:02and to be able to place George's works against that backdrop of an ever-changing landscape,
01:10where the light in every day is different.
01:13The majority of pieces were last seen when there was a major retrospective at the Mitchell Library in 2012.
01:21So it was a year-long exhibition that had been organised for George's 90th birthday,
01:25and George died during the run of that show.
01:27The majority of these works have been in storage since.
01:30We hope to change this space over at least two or three times a year.
01:34The humour of George's work is very much a gallows humour,
01:37and having been through the experiences that he'd had earlier in life,
01:42through his wartime experiences for example,
01:46the sound of laughter flowing through the gallery isn't something that...
01:50there's not many places that you hear that.
01:53He started making public art that the public can't ignore.
01:56Huge projects such as the paper boat and the straw locomotive.
02:00The straw locomotive they put in a flatbed and drove round the schemes of Glasgow to take.
02:05It's a grand public art project to people's doorsteps.
02:10George was very passionate about him because he was such a well-known local character.
02:15The Continental Cafe in Goorock, where he'd have his evening meal most nights after Daphne's passing,
02:22apparently he would announce himself by opening the door and throwing his bonnet through into the bath.
02:28This building itself sits on a former shipyard.
02:31The paper boat from 1988 was built round about here by traditional shipbuilders and welders.
02:41George's studio was built into the Undercroft and they would throw the doors open
02:47and the view of the Clyde Estuary was directly in front of him.
02:52The majority of these sculptures were being made in his workshop, or his basement as he called it,
02:58against the backdrop of this view.
03:00So for us to be able to continue to display them as they were intended with that backdrop is quite beautiful.
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