The creative energy associated with building ships and seafaring knows no limits. Former mariner and Customs and Excise officer, George Wyllie, said of his giant "social sculpture, The Paper Boat, when it launched on the River Clyde in 1989, that he wasn't nostalgic about the business of shipbuilding, but rather for the skills and the spirit that went into it.

"Where had this energy gone? On paper," he maintained, "I am the only shipbuilder left on the Clyde."
Wyllie is one of many artists represented in a new national art collection established by the Scottish Maritime Museum in Irvine. The collection is housed in a Victorian glass-roofed building, at Irvine Harbour. This building is the perfect setting for a maritime museum, having once thrummed with the clanging and crashing of boat building when it was the engine room of the Alexander Stephen Shipyard at Linthouse, Govan, in Glasgow. The Linthouse yard, which had fallen into disrepair, following the demise of widespread shipbuilding on the Clyde, was bought by the Scottish Development Agency in 1987 and duly demolished. The engine shop was then transported, piece by piece, to Irvine, where it began a new life as the Scottish Maritime Museum in 1991.
The Linthouse is crammed to capacity with historic boats and artefacts relating to all matters maritime. The museum is a testament to the historic and continuing importance of the sea to Scotland. Its new art collection, which has been slowly building up since 2015 under curator, Fiona Greer, amplifies the way in which artists have always been drawn to the sea.

The summer-into-autumn exhibition, Collecting Art of a Seafaring Nation, presents a snapshot of the collection and features work by F.C.B. Cadell, Muirhead Bone, Ian Fleming, Frances Walker, Kate Downie, Arthur Watson, Joyce Cairns, Will Maclean, John Bellany, James Watt and Sylvia Wishart to name but a few.

"The driving force of the collection is a desire to represent the coastline of Scotland and to travel across the centuries to tell Scotland's maritime story," says Greer, who has worked tirelessly to build not only a collection, but to establish a lively programme of associated artists' talks, workshops in making art and storytelling.

The exhibition is split into sections; shipbuilding, war and loss, leisure and transport, harbours and fishing, industry – oil and shipping and inspired by the sea. Most of it is presented in a small exhibition space which has slowly improved over the last three years thanks to better lighting and presentation conditions.
Outside in the "engine yard", there's larger sculptural work and wall-based work, including the last remaining remnants of Wyllie's Paper Boat, in the shape of a large embroidered QM from the side of the vessel and the little tender boat which he used to row out to the Paper Boat.
Beside it, Clydebank-born Tom McKendrick's large conceptual work, The Hole Borer, honours the flat-capped men of the shipyards who made the holes into which rivets were inserted. A nod to the fact that it's always the riveters who received the glory and not the hole borers.

Presiding over the entrance to the museum is Estonian-born Scots sculptor, Benno Schotz's Figure of a Shipbuilder (1949). This figure, made from smooth cement fondue, has the dignified bearing of a medieval knight, with his clothing resembling tough riveted steel plate ships. Schotz, who worked as a draughtsman at John Brown's Shipyard in Clydebank, later became Her Majesty’s Sculptor in Ordinary for Scotland.

Chrysalis 1996, a recently acquired work by Ian Hamilton Finlay (with John Brazenall) is on the museum's Wall of Wonders. In true Finlay-style, this bronze propellor with wings inside a wooden slatted box explores his ongoing fascination between words and objects. The propellor is trapped but winged, hinting at breaking-free and transformation.
One of the biggest works of art in the new collection is Patrica Cain and Ann Nisbet's 2011 sculpture, Propping Through Riverside, a timber and zinc construction which brings together the contemporary "propping" steel of cutting-edge buildings such as Zaha Hadid’s Riverside Museum and the temporary blocks, shores and props of traditional shipbuilding.
Our connection to the sea is closely linked to storytelling and this aspect of maritime art is well-served in Collecting Art of a Seafaring Nation.

The setting for the work in the engine shed is perfect. Light pours in from the Victorian glass ceiling casting shadows on old boats and maritime artefacts which sit cheek-by-jowl with works by Joyce W.Cairns, Albert Watson and Will Maclean. Cairns is represented by a large painting called The Loss (1990). The artist, who lived in the Aberdeen fishing village of Footdee for 30 years, paints a host of characters into her canvas invoking the anguished spirit of northern European expressionism, with accompanying symbols and totems. At the centre of the painting is a dinghy, Aberdeen Pilot Boat No 2, into which figures, including a menacing-looking clown are crammed. A well-dressed woman in red shoes clutching a newborn baby stares unflinchingly at the viewer.

I was moved by Will Maclean's 1994 sculpture, Black Vessel Floundering, which returns to his ongoing interest in themes of navigation, emigration, whaling, fishing and global exploration. This work is based around the story of an Irish emigrant ship which sank off the coast of Islay en route from Londonderry to Quebec in 1847, killing all 240 souls on board. With Maclean, it is always the simple yet affecting details which stop you in your tracks. In the bowels of his sleek black boat, there are parts of human figures, which tell the story of the 108 bodies snatched from the sea by islanders while the others stayed in their watery grave.

As you enter the exhibition space, there's a wall of early twentieth century transport posters, which Greer tracked down at auction houses. Lithographic prints such as Frank Henry Mason's 1927 poster of Rothesay Bay tell the story of the heyday of shipping as a passport to leisure.
Several of the artists represented in the new collection are involved in series of talks and events for the duration of the exhibition. Kate Downie, whose work created in the late1980s aboard north sea oil platforms is in the exhibition will deliver a talk this afternoon, while Will Maclean will be there on Saturday October 6. James Watt, who has been documenting the maritime life of his home town of Greenock since the 1950s will present an evening event on Thursday October 18.
If you haven't visited this most excellent – and strangely soothing – museum yet. Let a light autumn wind propel you in a westerly direction pronto.
 

Collecting the Art of a Seafaring Nation, Scottish Maritime Museum, Harbour Road, Irvine, Ayrshire, 01294 278283, www.scottishmaritimemuseum.org. Until October 21, daily, 10am–5pm, £7.50 (£5.50 concession/children under 16, free)

CRITIC'S CHOICE

The Glasgow School of Art (GSA) hasn't had its troubles to seek of late. The ink had barely dried on undergraduate degree certificates back in June when fire ripped through its world-famous Mackintosh Building in the Garnethilll area of the city for the second time in four years.

But life goes on. Art schools are not always about buildings. People make Glasgow, so the slogan goes, but people also make the Glasgow School of Art. Despite having been hampered by accessing their work in the Reid Building, which sits opposite the Mackintosh Building and suffered external damage in the fire, some four hundred postgraduate students in a host of disciplines have been working throughout the summer on their degree shows.
This year's Graduate Degree Show, presents a fizz of creative energy on an industrial scale. The Tontine Building on Trongate which features one hundred students from Fine Art, Creative Practices and Curatorial Practice along with School of Simulation and Visualisation Sound for the Moving Image. The nearby Garment Factory plays host to three hundred students from the Design School, School of Simulation and Visualisation, Mackintosh School of Architecture and Innovation School.

All the students showing work in the Garment Factory would have been in the Reid Building had the fire not happened.

If you are interested in developments in contemporary art practice, this is one to see. As post-graduate students, there is a polish to the shows not always present in undergraduate degree shows. In fine art, I spotted several themes emerging; Me Too and gender issues are examined in depth, as is the thorny issue of digital data and where it goes. There's a few shows which carry an "explicit content" warning too.

Amy Bergener's clockwork girls caught my eye, as did Natasha Lall's Pink Excavation, which leaps five hundred years into the future to find a future archivist excavating the queer histories in the "early digital age.".
I loved Tinja Ruusvuori's digital depiction of a journey to the afterlife. She invites viewers to climb aboard the rickety chassis of an old motorbike whereupon a disembodied GPS sat nav guides you to oblivion. There are even complimentary products provided, including a towel which says, You are Dead.

There's something here for eyes and minds of all persuasions. Even good ole-fashioned painting. Diane Evans drawings and paintings are low-key and very accomplished. It shows you where my head was that I read her scribbled notes on sketches as "pastel penises" rather than "pastel pencils". Someone please clean up my hard-drive…

The Glasgow School of Art Graduate Degree Show 2018, http://www.gsa.ac.uk/life/gsa-events/events/g/graduate-degree-show-2018. Fine Art + Sound for the Moving Image

Tontine Building, 20 Trongate, Glasgow, G1 5ES and Architecture, Design, Simulation + Visualisation, Innovation, The Garment Factory, 10 Montrose Street, Glasgow, G1 1RE. Until tomorrow. 10am-5pm, (Free)

DON'T MISS


 

Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen – The Waves of Sea and Love, a new cycle of 24 paintings by Audrey Grant 12-28 September 12-28 at Panter & Hall, 11-12 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5LU, 0207 399 9999, www.panterandhall.com. September 12-28. Free

If you are in London in the second half of September, check out Edinburgh-based painter, Audrey Grant's new series of paintings, inspired by 19th Century Austrian dramatist Franz Grillparzer's play, Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen.

For this new exhibition at Panter & Hall, Grant has created a suite of paintings about the sea in paint. She immerses herself in the sea as motif, metaphor and force of nature, through the Greek myth about doomed lovers, Hero and Leander, which is the central storyline of Grillparzer's tragedy.
These works represent a change in approach for Grant to a loose, almost automatic way of painting – totally immersing herself in the work as she works from one canvas to the next.