My former tutor, friend and colleague Gerard Wilson, who has died aged 81, quietly but profoundly reshaped British sculpture education, which had been bound by patriarchal traditions and narrow definitions of artistic value.
As a lecturer at Brighton and Chelsea art colleges, and other institutions including the Royal College of Art, the Slade, Central St Martins and Falmouth, Gerard stood apart – not loudly, but unwaveringly – in his support for broader, more conceptual understandings of sculpture. He embraced performance, installation, non-traditional materials and interdisciplinary thinking long before these were widely accepted. He recognised that sculpture was not only objects, but was also preoccupied with ideas, space and presence.
Born in Balsham, Cambridgeshire, Gerard was the second of the three children of Teresa (nee Hobart), an auditor, and her husband, William Wilson. Gerard’s early life was shaped by independence and absence – he met his father only once, briefly.
He gained a place at St Joseph’s college in Upper Norwood, south London, run by the De La Salle Brothers; Gerard’s abilities were quickly recognised and he skipped an academic year. He recalled the Brothers’ intellectual openness as pivotal. Their encouragement for him to explore philosophy, literature and art independently with emotional sensitivity shaped Gerard’s approach to teaching. On leaving school, he took a foundation year at Norwich, then a degree at Brighton Art College.
He was known for his advocacy of female artists, many of whom found in his studio a rare and vital source of encouragement in an otherwise dismissive or exclusionary environment. Students and colleagues recall a man of quiet intellect, generosity, deep attentiveness and a self-mocking wit. He opened doors, rather than prescribed paths, enabling each artist to articulate their own preoccupations. Artists such as Helen Chadwick, Thomas J Price, Simon Perry and Gerard de Thame, whom he taught, cite him as a pivotal influence. De Thame recalls that “his tutorials were never didactic, but were more like an invitation – to think boldly, to question deeply”. Laura Ford said: “He taught me how to really look at what we were making, not what we imagined we were making ... to freely try things out, looking and thinking all the while.”
After his retirement in 2008, Gerard joined a pottery group where he explored the interplay of moving image and clay. As with his earlier work, seen in shows at the Serpentine and ICA in London and the Ikon gallery in Birmingham, he found the playing with conceptual concerns exhilarating. And he rekindled his love for tennis.
Gerard is survived by his partner, Jennie Read, whom he met in Brighton in 1973 and married in 2017, their daughter, Therica, his brother, William, and sister, Marie.
