Contemporary artist Will Collieson grew up in the town of Wallasey on Merseyside, England. As a boy, he remembers playing endlessly with Dinky cars which he would carefully place in an imaginary circuit on a carpet. He also loved playing with toy soldiers outside in the soil. Though his fascination with objects goes back to an early age, it never occurred to him at the time that passion would have artistic implications. Educated at Wellington Private School in Bebington, he had no exposure to art since it was not offered on the curriculum. A visit with his mother to his aunt, who lived in Paris as Vice Consul for the British Embassy, opened his eyes to the world of art. As an amateur painter, his aunt knew many artists, as did her husband, a French police officer responsible for investigating counterfeit art. “The Bohemian lifestyle of the artists fascinated me,” Will says.
“You could say what you wanted, dress how you wanted – it was a new world of expression.” Back home he attended a still life night class at the Wallasey Art School where he was the only teenager, the other students being adults. He attended the school fulltime once he reached 16, with his mother’s support. “My father was dead against it,” he remembers. For two years he gained a general art education in painting, sculpture and typography. His love for objects continued – and developed. With other students, he would explore derelict sites in the Docks and make sculptures out of things left or abandoned – pieces of broken railway track, for example. Born after the Second World War, Will was nevertheless influenced by both World Wars. His grandfather was killed in the carnage of the First. And watching a movie focusing on the survivors of Belsen Concentration Camp opened his eyes to the atrocities of the Second. “It was like watching the living dead,” he remembers. Many of the sites he explored had been blitzed, another legacy of the Second World War.
Aged 18 he successfully applied for a window dresser’s assistant position at the retail store Austin Reed. He enjoyed learning the craft of careful placement crucial to effective window display. Later he joined John Lewis’s Department Store in Liverpool as senior display assistant and was sent to the Oxford Street branch for training. The store in Liverpool had a top floor studio where he would work on
window displays for special occasions such as Christmas. “I got into building backgrounds as well as the placement of objects,” he says. Shortly after he married Wendy, whom he had met at art school, he saw an advertisement for a window display manager position at H.A. &E Smith in Bermuda. He drove down to London to meet Sir Henry Vesey. “I had very long hair at the time,” he remembers, “and I was wearing my patent leather Chelsea
boots.” So began his long connection with Smith’s, his window displays becoming famous for his artistic use of unusual objects to display luxurious merchandise. He briefly left Bermuda in 1978 to take up a position in London at Simpsons but a chance encounter with Sir Henry Vesey in London led to his being rehired in 1981 and he has been on the island ever since. Smiths had twelve window display staff, necessary because for many years they had a branch in just about every hotel. In 1994 and 1995 Will received the International Art Directors and Illustrators Award.
One reason for returning to Bermuda, Will realised, was Bermuda gave him far more opportunity to follow his own creative pursuits. Back on the island, He continued his pastime of exploring sites for different objects, often incorporating them in his own works. For example, he discovered that Ariel Sands was where in the past knackered work horses were thrown into the sea. Discovering horse bones there, he used them in his sculpture entitled “Work Will Make You Free,” a slogan displayed at Auschwitz concentration camp. His numerous works have been exhibited in The Bermuda Society of Arts Gallery, the Bermuda National Gallery and the Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art. In January 2011 the Bermuda National Gallery presented a retrospective of Will’s work, saying in its brochure, “…. Collieson’s work is characterized by its satirical humor, the variety of unconventional materials, and by the continual probing of his art. His work presents opposites, contradictions, paradoxes and ironies while at the same time breaking away entirely from traditional realism.” Will himself says he has been inspired by other sculptors and artists, including Arthur Dooley, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. Will’s work can also be found in Bermuda’s public spaces. Erected in 2013, his 26-foot-tall sculpture entitled Points of View stands outside the new Waterloo House. His copper grouper, made out of old copper sheeting from the Cathedral, greets visitors outside the Aquarium. His shoal of fish stands on Wesley Street while his Plexiglas kites hang in the Emporium. “I never had a plan to become an artist,” Will reflects. “I just got caught up in it.” How fortunate for Bermuda he did.
