David Kemp obituary | Art

In 1981 the artist David Kemp went to live in Cornwall, settling in the village of Botallack, on a crooked hill, far to the west, surrounded by ruined tin mines. He converted an old building to use as a workshop, and began painting old furniture with crazy, whimsical images of temples, seascapes, monsters and breasts.

Although this sold well, he became very interested in the garbage he found everywhere. The old mine was used by all and sundry as a tip. There were, he laughed, “more fridges here than wolves”. Kemp, who has died aged 80, was soon making art out of unwanted, fantastical and mysterious monsters, and began to think he had stumbled upon a long-lost religious tradition.

He was a fantasy in his mind, that he was a 34th century archaeologist digging underground to find the broken remains of an ancient civilization (ours). They also collected parts of agricultural machines, cars, tail lights, TVs, washing machines, wheels, engines, earthenware covers, everything, to create pictures of what they thought these lost cultural gods must have looked like, and the myths that ancient people made these things believe.

In a shed on the site, he began building what he called the Museum of the Future. These precious objects were displayed in displays and, when they were very large, on plinths, freestanding. Texts describe how these ancient people made poles to hold up the sky, and used fire to turn night into day. But one day their fire escaped and burned a hole in the sky. They dug deep underground holes to escape danger, and their culture was buried for hundreds of years, until now.

In 1997, he installed the museum, which is now called Art of Darkness, in Botallack Count House, courtesy of the National Trust, for a year before turning the house into a visitor center – the only museum I’ve ever been in that matched the laughter of visitors.

Kemp received the most public art commissions in the UK – 38 between 1982 and 2011, some of them large. In 1989, he built two very large figures, more than 20ft, of a mine and a metal conductor, called The Old Transformers. He looks out, from the rolling hills of County Durham, on a site once filled with derelict factories and the smokestacks of Consett ironworks, one of the world’s largest ironworks, swept away in the early 1980s. Now two Kemp’s heads, built with engines and transformers removed from factories, are looking at a flat, empty place like the fortnight of Easter Island, moving tribute to the workers who built Britain’s industrial years.

When the Geevor tin mine in Cornwall closed in 1990, after nearly 200 years of operation, Kemp rescued the miners’ old boots that were being thrown down the pit, not knowing what to do with them. It became his sculptures of laughing dogs, Tinner’s Hounds, some of which are now cast in bronze in Tatty Square, Redruth, the “headquarters” of Cornish tin mines.

For the Eden Project, a series of eco-houses in a disused clay pit in Cornwall, Kemp created a series of artworks, including the beautiful Garden of Plastic Delights, a stunning Hieronymus Bosch painting, filled with twisted plants made from waste pipes, with composite discs of disused flowers. Kemp can be thought of as the Bosch of our time – an outsider artist who created a vivid picture of the world that transcended art conventions.

The first of four children of Dorothy (nee Green) and Lesley Kemp, an air traffic controller, David was born in London. As a child, he used to watch ships sailing on the Thames – his dream was to live on one. After leaving Farnham grammar school, he joined the merchant navy. Four years later, after traveling all over the world, he looked to the other side as his boat sailed down the Thames, and saw the place where he stood as a boy. Determined to continue his dream, he immediately left the navy and went to art school, first at Wimbledon and then at Farnham.

One of his earliest and most famous sculptures, The Navigators (1986), is a 60ft-high tower, which he described as “an iron fish dreaming of voyages through storms and ice”, at the Hays Galleria, near London Bridge – his childhood fantasy repeated.

In 1977 he married Mercedes Esteban Maes, a lecturer in fine arts at Falmouth University. She is survived by her son, George, and granddaughter, Ula.