For a week in September 2018, walkers on the South Bank in London found themselves faced with a 9m-high human profile in wood, gazing across the Thames from a pier opposite Gabriel’s Wharf. With the distant feel of one of Naum Gabo’s early constructivist pieces, this was Head Above Water, the work of the designer and sculptor Steuart Padwick, who has died of stomach cancer aged 63.
The sculpture was arresting by day, and more so by night. Passersby could message the head from their mobile phones, alerting it to their feelings. Head Above Water would light up accordingly, its palette changing with the dominant temper of the texts it received: blue for melancholy, green for calm and so on. It thus became, briefly, an emotional thermometer for London, a measure of the capital’s mood. “You can play with it – hashtag happy, hashtag sad – and change the colours in real time,” Padwick explained in a video on the work’s website. “And that’s kind of fun. But it also makes you realise that you can change your emotions.”
Padwick had reason to be interested in this. Beneath the optimism of his message lay a faint wistfulness of manner. Head Above Water’s title was autobiographical. For much of its creator’s adult life, he had experienced periods of depression.
The sculpture had been made to help publicise the mental health charity Time to Change. (This lost its funding and closed in 2021.) Four years before the South Bank project, Padwick had been on a studio residency in the US on an island off Maine. While there, he had constructed a sculpture made up of a stone pillar at the water’s edge topped by a stone bowl that would stay visible at high tide. “‘I’d been struggling for so long at the bottom of the sea, gulping for the odd bit of air,” Padwick recalled. Now, for the moment, he saw that his head was above water.
What made his story emblematic of depression was that there seemed so little reason for him to have it. The son of a Royal Navy officer, Michael Padwick, and his wife, Nita (nee Harris), an artist, Padwick had a childhood that was, on the face of it, both conventional and comfortable.
Commander Padwick was on a year-long tour on HMS Belfast when his elder son was born, in Plymouth, Devon. Postings in Australia and Scotland meant a peripatetic childhood for the boy. As was usual for the sons of naval officers, he was sent off as a boarder at eight. Due to move on to his father’s old public school, a feeder for the navy, Padwick was instead sent to Bedales, a famously liberal, coeducational school. “It must have been my mother who decided that I should go there,” he mused later. “She was the creative one.”
Among the school’s eccentricities was a carpentry workshop. “I learned how to cut a mortice and tenon joint and so on, and realised I had a knack for it,” Padwick said. From Bedales, he went on, in 1977, to the newly opened School for Craftsmen in Wood (later Parnham College), near Beaminster in Dorset, brainchild of the designer John Makepeace. “Parnham was an extraordinary place,” Padwick said. “One day you would be making perfect dovetail joints, the next you’d be creating shelters in the woods.” This was followed by two years, 1981-82, studying furniture design at the Royal College of Art, with Jasper Morrison as a contemporary.
By now, Padwick had set up his own design studio with three Parnham friends. His first commission, from the Duke of Beaufort, was for a wardrobe meant as a wedding present for the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer. “They absolutely hated it,” the rueful designer recalled. “I was gutted at the time but now I find it quite funny.” Three decades later, Padwick was again commissioned to design royal furniture, this time for the children of the current Prince and Princess of Wales. The resulting suite of nursery table and chairs, in Teletubby colours and with a tabletop that doubled as a wobble board, drew a more enthusiastic response.
Alongside these bespoke pieces, Padwick had also had more commercial success. While his own-name brand, launched in 2009, had been well received critically – clients included the Conran Shop, where he had once been a buyer – this was not reflected by income from sales. (“I was going broke,” the designer said baldly, in an interview in 2017.) Then, in 2010, he was approached by the online design brand made.com to work on its launch range.
If Padwick was initially doubtful about the offer, the partnership proved beneficial for both sides. By the time of his death, Made was selling more than 10,000 pieces of his work each year, among them the red-drawered Fonteyn console desk, its legs splayed like a ballerina en jeté. This gave Padwick time to concentrate on other design work, such as the Double Cross dining table, its folding, X-shaped legs lacquered in bright orange or yellow. It also allowed him to make sculpture, including the 23m-high Hope (2021), a child, arms outstretched, perched above a woodland park on the site of Glasgow’s last working coalmine.
All these were marked by a punning lightheartedness that their maker had not always been able to feel. Even as a schoolboy at Bedales, he had struggled with a sense of abandonment. “I did have one safe haven,” Padwick recalled. “I lived in the workshop as much as I could.” In later life he threw himself into skiing and paragliding, and with both had serious accidents. The irony of his position struck him. “I’ve had indifferent mental health and I’ve also broken bones, lots of bones,” he said in a video that accompanied Head Above Water. “People aren’t ashamed of saying ‘I broke my leg’, but we’re embarrassed to say, ‘Oh, I’ve had depression’.”
He is survived by his partner, Natalie May (formerly Alexopoulos), and a son, Todd, from an earlier relationship with Vanessa Ewan, and by his siblings, Lisa and Rob.
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