Set sail for a moving new collection

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 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 the harbour. This building is the perfect setting for a maritime museum, having once thrummed with the clanging and crashing of boatbuilding when it was the engine room of the Alexander Stephen Shipyard at Linthouse, Govan, in Glasgow. The Linthouse yard, which had fallen into disrepair after 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 life as the Scottish Maritime Museum in 1991.

The Linthouse is crammed 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 FCB Cadell, Muirhead Bone, Ian Fleming, Frances Walker, Kate Downie, Arthur Watson,