Introduction
The sculptor and educator David Harding, who has died aged 88, maintained a firm belief that art should endure the same conditions as everyone else, standing exposed to the elements and integrated into everyday life.
As the town artist for Glenrothes, Fife, during the late 1960s and 1970s, Harding embedded sculpture within underpasses, bus stops, and housing schemes. He collaborated with urban planners rather than opposing them, employing the same concrete and brick materials as those used in the surrounding streets. His work was not mere decoration but a form of argument: demonstrating that public spaces could carry memory, poetry, and dissent.
Art Embedded in Glenrothes
Harding’s approach in Glenrothes was to treat the town itself as both his studio and source material, creating works that were inseparable from their sites. His pieces, such as Henge, a spiral of cast concrete slabs that appeared as if uncovered rather than installed, and Industry, a mural in an underpass inspired by West African patterns, translated cultural motifs into relief surfaces that captured the shifting Scottish light.
Other works included rows of embossed columns titled Heritage, the somber Dugs Cemetery in Pitteuchar, and ten poetry slabs set into bus stops, phone boxes, and the Glenwood shopping centre. These installations reflected Harding’s conviction that language and sculpture could interrupt routine journeys and provoke reflection. Both Henge and Industry have since been designated listed structures, underscoring the durability and significance of art conceived for everyday passage rather than ceremonial purposes.
Harding’s works were not monuments but propositions. His practice in Glenrothes posed questions about who art was for and who could claim authorship. Rather than merely describing his approach as radical, Harding demonstrated it through shared decision-making, working on site, and treating context as inseparable from form.
Educational Leadership and Influence
From 1978 to 1985, Harding 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 the Glasgow School of Art alongside others, 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 same phrase.
Harding eventually became head of sculpture and environmental art (SEA) until his retirement in 2001. During this time, he worked closely with Sandy Moffat, head of painting and printmaking, and Joyce Ainsley, who ran the MFA programme at the school. Together, they shaped what became widely recognized as a distinctive Glasgow approach: outward-looking, critically alert, and embedded in place.
After retirement, the trio continued to collaborate as a group, exhibiting together and creating new work through residencies. Harding also maintained a significant creative partnership with the artist Rachel Gomme. 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 the medium of moving image.
In 2017, Harding and Gomme 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. At the same event, Harding created Desire Lines, a path of concrete slabs embedded with lines from Samuel Beckett’s love poem Cascando. In 2025, the duo created Desire Lines at the Loggia dei Vini in Villa Borghese, Rome.
Early Life and Career
Born in Leith, David Harding was the son of Alfred Harding, a ship’s plumber, and Kathleen (née Murray). He attended Holy Cross Academy in Edinburgh, followed by Edinburgh College of Art (1955-59), where he concentrated on the sculptural use of glass, concrete, and ceramics—materials then marginal to fine art but central to construction and daily life. He subsequently completed teacher training at Moray House College of Education.
In 1961, during his first term as a newly qualified teacher at Holy Cross, he met Frances McKechnie. They married in 1962. A year later, the couple moved to Lafia, Nigeria, where Harding led the art department of a rural teacher-training college 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 potter Michael Cardew. This encounter with West African architectural traditions, communal labour, and pattern-making broadened Harding’s understanding of how art could be embedded in lived structures.
Upon returning to Scotland at age 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.
Honours and Legacy
David Harding was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2002. In 2018, along with Joyce Ainsley and Sandy Moffat, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Glasgow.
He and Frances separated in 1989, after which Frances took up a teaching post at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
Harding is survived by their children Damien, Ninian, Donald, Martha, Abigail, and Benedict, as well as 11 grandchildren and one great-grandson.
