Place specific. People specific.

"My art is place specific and people specific." George Wyllie

The final Saturday working on the website for schools. Schools have already been using it, but by this time next week, it will also be a public website.

There are three parts of the site which feature work by George Wyllie on which there is not a major focus at the exhibition. It means that pupils using the site before and/or after visits are still learning about an aspect of his work.

Those three parts of the site are place specific... Hiroshima, Ireland, Scotland. As part of his working life, George Wyllie was in each one of them and the impact they had on him was later expressed in his art.

1945. Hiroshima.
A young sailor, having docked in a Japanese port not long after the atomic bomb was dropped, takes a train to Hiroshima. For that young sailor, the visit made a difference. Fifty years later, he turned George Square, Glasgow into a memorial in a ceremony involving both a Scottish pupil and a Japanese pupil.

1994. Ireland.
A much older man travelled around the 32 counties in Ireland - six in the north, twenty-six in the south. He collected sticks and stones from each one and turned them into perfectly-balanced spires, placing them across the land border between north and south, a land border he had worked on as a customs officer. The aim was to unite the two sides.

2000. Scotland.
As devolution becomes a reality, Stones of Scotland is put in place above what will become the Scottish Parliament. 32 stones, one from each local authority in Scotland, placed in a circle, with a stone slab within the circle, a footprint cut into it. Whose the tread that fits the mark? is inscribed beside it. Another question.

"... this work is a reminder to a new era of Scottish politics that the centre must involve and be legitimised by all that surrounds it." George Wyllie

His art was certainly place specific and people specific.

Creating the website has been a good place to explore those ideas. Hopefully, pupils will use the site to do that too.