David Harding obituary | Art and design

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 that caught and held the shifting Scottish light. Rows of embossed columns titled Heritage, the sombre Dugs Cemetery in Pitteuchar, and 10 poetry slabs set into bus stops, phone boxes, and the Glenwood shopping centre extended his conviction that language and sculpture could interrupt routine journeys. Henge and Industry are now listed structures, testament to the durability of work conceived for everyday passage rather than ceremony.

These works were not monuments but propositions. Harding’s practice in Glenrothes asked who art was for and who could claim authorship. Rather than describe his approach as radical, Harding demonstrated it in practice – sharing decisions, working on site, and treating context as inseparable from form.

That emphasis became central to his teaching. From 1978 to 1985, he lectured in the department of art and social context at Dartington College of Arts, in Devon, where he developed a curriculum that placed artistic production firmly within social and political frameworks. In 1985, he returned to Scotland to establish the environmental art department at Glasgow alongside Sam Ainsley, and supported by Brian Kelly. The department’s guiding phrase – “context is half the work” – embodied Harding’s belief that meaning arises as much from circumstance as from the object itself. This mantra drew inspiration from the strategies of the Artist Placement Group, initiated by Barbara Steveni in collaboration with John Latham in 1966, whose manifesto began with the phrase.

Harding eventually became head of SEA (sculpture and environmental art), until his retirement in 2001. During this time, he worked closely with Sandy Moffat, head of painting and printmaking, and Ainsley, who had ran the MFA programme at the school. Together, they shaped what became widely recognised as a distinctive Glasgow approach: outward-looking, critically alert, and embedded in place.

After retirement, the trio continued to collaborate as AHM, exhibiting together and creating new work through residencies. Harding also maintained a significant creative partnership with the artist Ross Birrell. Their film Port Bou: 18 Fragments for Walter Benjamin, premiered at Kunsthalle Basel in 2006, extending Harding’s longstanding engagement with site, history, and political memory into moving image.

In 2017, they collaborated on Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, commissioning the Syrian Expat Philharmonic Orchestra to perform Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No 3 at Documenta 14 in Kassel, where Harding also created Desire Lines, a path of concrete slabs embedded with lines from Samuel Beckett’s love poem Cascando. In 2025, the duo created Dante Desire Line Poetry Path at the Loggia dei Vini in Villa Borghese, Rome.

Born in Leith, David was the son of Alfred Harding, a ship’s plumber, and Kathleen (nee Murray). He went to Holy Cross academy in Edinburgh, followed by Edinburgh College of Art (1955-59), concentrating on the sculptural use of glass, concrete and ceramics – materials then marginal to fine art but central to construction and daily life. Thereafter Harding did his teacher training at Moray House College of Education.

In 1961, during his first term as a newly qualified teacher at his alma mater, Holy Cross, he met Frances McKechnie. They were married in 1962. A year later, the couple moved to Lafia, Nigeria, where Harding led the art department of a rural teacher-training college, remaining there until 1967. He encouraged his students to develop their own artistic language drawing on Nigerian culture, rather than western artistic principles, and built a pottery workshop and kiln under the guidance of the potter Michael Cardew. The encounter with west African architectural traditions, communal labour, and pattern-making broadened Harding’s understanding of how art could be embedded in lived structures.

On returning to Scotland aged 30, Harding decided to leave school teaching and pursue sculpture independently. After a year of self-employment and small commissions, the Glenrothes appointment provided the civic scale his ideas required.

He was made OBE in 2002, and in 2018, along with Ainsley and Moffat, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Glasgow.

He and Frances had separated in 1989, after which Frances took up a teaching post at the then School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

Harding is survived by their children, Damien, Ninian, Donald, Martha, Abigail, and Benedict, 11 grandchildren, and one great-grandson.