‘I have tried to find out if there are any other cruise terminals with art galleries in them,’ says Will Cooper, director of The Wyllieum, as we look out of the building’s majestic floor-to-ceiling front windows across the chilly Clyde. What’s a Wyllieum, you might ask? Well, like an art gallery in a cruise terminal, it’s something of a one-off. Occupying part of Greenock Ocean Terminal, where vast tourist liners dock during the summer months, The Wyllieum is a new home for the permanent art collection of one of the town’s most famous (adopted) sons, Glasgow-born sculptor George Wyllie. Opening this month, the gallery will show Wyllie’s work as well as temporary exhibitions by artists whose practice bears affinities and connections with it.

For more than three decades, George Ralston Wyllie (who died in 2012 aged 90) worked as a customs and excise officer in a port building a few hundred metres away. For this reason and others, the gallery’s location is, like much of Wyllie’s work, whimsically poetic. But the presence of a contemporary art gallery on a site previously associated with waterborne trade also underpins a deeper, more complex symbolism (again, like lots of Wyllie’s art). In the decades following the dismantling of heavy industry along the Clyde, Greenock has undergone a profound identity shift. One of the more positive aspects is the evolution of its creative life. As if to illustrate the point, the next building along from the artist’s old workplace is the stylish Beacon Arts Centre which opened in 2013.

Wyllie never went to art school, only taking up art-making full-time in his late 50s, around the point he retired from Greenock Customs And Excise Department. It’s partly why he’s still seen  in some circles as an eccentric autodidact or ‘outsider artist’. The son of an engineer’s clerk and a telephonist, Wyllie trained as an engineer with the Post Office before serving in the Royal Navy during World War II, returning to take up his customs job in 1947. Three decades later, as the man himself insisted, it was ‘time for art’.

The work he went on to create found fame in Scotland and beyond. He was an early adopter of styles we might now call performance art and site-specific art, and was mentored by Joseph Beuys and the Scottish-American kinetic artist George Rickey. Works by Wyllie predate near-identical ones created or proposed by Claes Oldenburg and Jeff Koons. Outsider? Hardly. But labels stick.

Wyllie’s two most famous creations tackle the de-industrialisation of the Clyde with oblique wit. His ‘Straw Locomotive’ was a giant toy-train engine (made from straw, steel and chicken wire), suspended from the totemic Finnieston Crane for six weeks in 1987, before being transported to a former locomotive works in Springburn for a ceremonial ‘Viking funeral’. The 78-foot long ‘Paper Boat’ (it looks how you’d imagine, but was actually crafted from steel, plastic and gauze) set sail from the banks of the Clyde two years later, the artist on board in a crisp white boiler suit. The so-called ‘pride of the Origami Line’ graced the Thames too, and the Hudson River in New York, in different iterations of the accompanying performance. 

These pieces allude to the demise of industrial western Scotland with a nod and a wink. But the gestures are freighted with sorrow and anger. ‘A Paper Boat . . . not what a ship used to be,’ goes the song written to accompany the vessel’s maiden voyage from the decaying heart of British shipbuilding. As Cooper and I talk, he picks up some jaunty blue picture discs featuring the tune and muses on the comic aspect of Wyllie’s work. How much have we missed by fixating on this one facet? ‘I don’t think we’re always great at understanding humour in art. We just think something’s funny and then we move on. We don’t get to the next level.’ Perhaps for this reason, the new gallery director is keen that audiences get to see more of Wyllie’s output besides the locomotive and the boat: ‘we need to fill in the blanks.’

In The Wyllieum’s stunning temporary exhibition space (its big windows facing the water), Cooper is currently assembling the gallery’s first show with his co-curator, sculptor Sara Barker. This will feature a selection of Wyllie’s ‘Spires’, tripods of aluminium poles each holding a central rod in a gimbal of the kind used to keep ships’ compasses steady, weighted with a rock (hanging just above the ground) that makes it flail gently when nudged. ‘All of George’s work is about change, and the ebb and flow of life, and how equilibrium is maintained,’ says Cooper. He suggests this is connected to Wyllie’s wartime experiences. ‘He was one of the first servicemen to set foot in Hiroshima. That stuck with him. The idea of how violent the world could become, and how we can regain balance; all that was important to him.’ 

Next door we explore the permanent gallery, a smaller, landlocked space. We talk about Wyllie’s love of Americana and look at some oversized model guns coated in flannel with soap-bar cartridges; this is in homage to Tom Mix, a star of almost 300 cowboy movies who was known as the ‘cleanest gun in the west’. ‘George understood that the Wild West myth was actually a story of colonial exploitation,’ Cooper suggests. ‘The geopolitical aspects of his work are often missed.’ 

One advantage of the impression that Wyllie was not an artworld insider is that lots of people seem to feel less distance from him and his work than they might otherwise. Cooper says that for the first few months of work on the site, locals would come in every day to share memories and anecdotes about the man. ‘It’s unusual to have the general community feel so connected to a local artist like that. And being able to give something like this to the community is great.’

The Wyllieum opens in Greenock on Friday 26 April; main picture: David Barbour.