17 hours ago
10
My father, Stanford Fraser Steele, who has died aged 82, was a prolific maker and artist. His art encompassed drawing, sculpture, video, site-specific installations and woodworking.
Throughout his working life Stan was a visiting tutor and external examiner for many art schools, and senior lecturer in fine art at the University of East London (formerly North East London Polytechnic) for 30 years. His artwork is held in private collections and in the Government Art Collection.
Born in Edinburgh, the son of May (nee Kerr Smith), an architect’s assistant, and George Fraser Steele, a psychiatrist, he had an intriguing childhood. Stan lived for many years at a psychiatric hospital near Dundee, where his father worked. It was a baronial-style Victorian building, surrounded by forests and with a working farm where Stan spent his time riding the Fergie tractor, whittling wood and picking potatoes with the patients.
After studying at the High School of Dundee and then Brentwood school, Essex, at 16 he went to Walthamstow School of Art, where he met the musician Ian Dury, who became a longtime friend. They both went on to the Royal College of Art in London and were taught by Peter Blake in the early 1960s.
At the RCA (where he was awarded the Silver Medal for painting and the Prix de Rome travel scholarship) Stan met Rachel Wellings, who was studying textiles. They married in 1967. Stan rented a floor with other artist friends at St Katharine Docks, east London, the first SPACE studio. With Keith Albarn and other artists he designed the World of Islam Festival at the ICA, London, in 1971, which went to Rotterdam as the Islamathematica exhibition, culminating in the publication of The Language of Pattern (1974).
A move from London to the countryside in 1975 renewed Stan’s childhood interest in tractors and land. It stimulated ideas that would become repeated themes in his artwork: man and machines, both their relationship to the land and expressions of the memories the machinery evoked. He bought vintage tractors, an old truck and other farm machinery, learned to plough and acquired a saw bench to cut timber. He made charcoal drawings and clay wall reliefs of the machinery and figures, recorded the tractor sounds and stitched an embroidery piece showing the technical details of his tractor.
In the 90s Stan joined Housewatch, a group of artists using video and film, and they presented work at various sites in London: Broadgate Square, the South Bank and Hoxton Square for the opening of the Lux Centre, before undertaking a touring exhibition in Japan in 1992.
One of Stan’s seminal works was at Cuckoo Farm Studios, Colchester (1995). Unearthed One Acre was a year-long installation with live work – cultivation and harvesting of potatoes – in a field he ploughed. Part of the crop was served at the cafes of the Whitechapel and Arnolfini art galleries.
Stan retired from the University of East London in 1996 and moved to the Suffolk coast, selling his tractors to work on restoring wooden boats and designing and building his own studio. More recently, he moved to Edinburgh, where he returned to working on large-scale charcoal drawings, wooden reliefs and making woodwork planes.
He is survived by Rachel, his children, Sam and me, his grandchildren, Ruby, Honey and Bryce, and his brother, Graeme.
