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Will Maclean was born in Inverness in 1941. He was a midshipman (1957 59) before going to Gray's School of Art, Aberdeen (1961 65) and the British School in Rome (1966), followed by another year at sea in 1968 as a ring-net fisherman, working on the Ring Net project. He was appointed lecturer at the Faculty of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee in 1981, becoming Professor of Art in 1994 and in 2004, Senior Research Fellow and Emeritus Professor. He was elected RSA in 1991 and in 1999 he won the Scottish Arts Council Creative Scotland Award. He was recorded for the British Library and Tate Artists Lives sound archive in 2005 and lives and works in Tayport, Fife.
Maclean has exhibited widely since 1967. Solo exhibitions have included The Ring-Net, Third Eye Centre, Glasgow and tour (1978); Runkel-Hue-Williams, London (1990); Retrospective Exhibition, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh and tour (1992) with accompanying monograph Symbols of Survival; a major solo show, Driftworks at Dundee Contemporary Arts, 2001, and exhibitions with Art First, London, since 1994.
In 1999 his exhibition Cardinal Points was hosted by the Museum of North Dakota, Grand Forks, North Dakota USA before touring to Canada to McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, Ontario, and Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador, St. Johns.
Group exhibitions include Worlds in a Box, Edinburgh City Art Centre and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1994 95); and Contemporary British Art in Print, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (1995) which featured A Night of Islands, a set of ten etchings published in 1991. A major work was acquired for the new Scottish Parliament building and commissioned sculptures and collaborative works can be seen in Skye, Lewis and elsewhere in Scotland.
His work is in public collections including Arts Council of Great Britain; The British Museum; Dundee, Edinburgh, and Glasgow City Art Galleries; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Scottish Arts Council; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; McMaster Museum, Canada; Yale Centre for British Art, Newhaven, USA.
Maclean is internationally recognised as a foremost exponent of box construction art. Using found objects which he deconstructs and reconstructs in a display of visual thinking that is compelling, he has developed a unique visual and poetic language. Reductive and honed, his metaphorical art is based on the histories and mythologies of those who live and work by the sea. His deep interest in Highland culture reaches out to universal themes of navigation, emigration, whaling and fishing, and global exploration. There is always strong narrative contained in these fascinating works, though immediate interpretations can be elusive.
