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.
