Enduring legacy of an artist and visionary

Tim Stead, who died in 2000 at the age of 48, combined the roles of furniture maker, sculptor, designer, environmentalist, poet and educator with aplomb, enthusiasm and commitment.

This touring exhibition makes explicit the many achievements of this talented artist in a format that is expansive and well conceived. The Georgian splendour of Rozelle House, its converted stables and wooded grounds, allows Stead’s vision the necessary space and appropriate atmosphere.

Stead studied sculpture at Trent Polytechnic and, later, at Glasgow School of Art, at a time when “conceptual” art was gaining a firm hold in art colleges. At Trent, Stead became fascinated by the forms of decaying ships and barges in the nearby Nottingham Canal and began using discarded timber to construct elaborate forms using wood, string and other recycled materials — a version of Arte Povera.

A photograph from Stead’s Trent graduation in 1974 shows him standing next to his work Burnt Tower with Creaking Pendulum, a large structure comprised of discarded wood and bound together with rope and chain.

Such embryonic works were at the beginning of Stead’s rapid development. Many of his ideas took the form of rudimentary sketches in hundreds of notebooks. Some of these are to be seen here — they show the workings of a fecund imagination, where words and images interweave as ideas developed.

Towards the end of his life, Stead was unable to work with the huge slabs of timber that characterised the earlier part of his career. He began a massively ambitious project to develop smaller-scale sculpture. The result is a rich legacy of hundreds of intricate, finely honed works that reference a series of archetypal forms.

Stead died too young, at a time when his ideas were developing at a fast rate. We should be grateful for his invaluable and enduring legacy.

Until January 17