David Harding obituary

Obituary David Harding obituary Sculptor and educator who embedded art within the new town of Glenrothes and encouraged students at the Glasgow School of Art to move beyond the studio The sculptor and educator David Harding, who has died aged 88, insisted that art should stand in the same weather as everyone else. As town artist for Glenrothes, Fife, in the late 1960s and 70s, he embedded sculpture in underpasses, bus stops, and housing schemes, working with planners rather than against them and using the same concrete and brick as the surrounding streets. The result was not ornament but argument: that public space could carry memory, poetry and dissent. He carried these ideas into his leadership of the environmental art department at the Glasgow School of Art from the mid-80s. There, he encouraged his students to move beyond the studio, engaging institutions, communities, and landscapes as collaborators rather than mere backdrops. The course produced many Turner prize-winning and nominated artists, including Douglas Gordon , Christine Borland, Jim Lambie , Nathan Coley, Lucy Skaer, Martin Boyce, and David Shrigley . As important to Harding were those who entered the fields of community and social engagement, working beyond the walls of gallery and museum. Harding himself was appointed as town artist with the Glenrothes Development Corporation in 1968, after answering an advertisement in the Scotsman newspaper. At a time when new towns were often criticised for anonymity, Harding proposed that artists should operate from within the planning process to address this. Instead of being a decorative afterthought, his works would be embedded within construction thinking. He treated the town as studio and source material, binding his interventions to their sites. Henge, a spiral of cast concrete slabs, rose from the ground as if uncovered rather than installed. Industry, a mural in an underpass, translated patterns Harding had studied in west Africa into relief surfaces th...