1991

The Festival Theatre had recently undergone extensive refurbishment, and had been given a new glass-wall frontage as shown above. It seemed appropriate therefore that the new artwork for the gable wall should literally extend the idea of ‘glass theatre’ onto the gable, to create a kind of crossing place between their vastly different architectural styles.

Roddy McMillan was one of Scotland’s best loved actor/playwrights. He had written a play called ‘The Bevellers’, about the working lives of people who put bevels on the edges of glass sheets. In those days this work was hand done, by holding the glass against a large, flat, rotating stone wheel soaked with water.

My proposal therefore was to attach a new wall of bevelled glass panes to the gable of the old building. Onto the surfaces of these panes would have been etched these lines from McMillan’s play:

“Ye spend yer days grindin’ glass, an’ at the finish yer life’s like slurry at the bottom o’ the wheel”