Peter Kardia, who has died aged 93, was an inspirational art school teacher who taught a generation of British sculptors and artists at St Martin’s School of Art and at the Royal College of Art between the years of 1960 and 1986.
Unusually for that period, Peter defined himself as an art educationist rather than an artist. His formidable studio presence derived not from using his own work as a model for the analysis of what students had to offer, but from his interrogation of students’ own decision-making processes, leaving them to provide their own answers.
Peter was born in Norwich to Frederick Atkins, a landscape gardener, and his wife, Florence (nee Browne). He was educated at Norwich school before being conscripted during the second world war with a commission and serving in the Indian army until he was demobbed as a captain in 1947. He then enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and studied sculpture, where his talent was noticed by Henry Moore, who invited him to become one of his assistants.
After leaving Moore’s studio in 1953 he took up a post teaching art in South Africa, before returning to the UK in 1964 to teach on the sculpture course at St Martin’s School of Art (now Central Saint Martins), where I was one of his students. At St Martin’s he led a radical programme that became known as the Locked Room course, under which students were locked in a room for several hours and given material to work on without any critical feedback from their tutors.
In 1973 Peter, who changed his surname to Kardia around this time, was invited by the Royal College of Art to set up an environmental media course catering for students whose main concern was with the use of contemporary media such as film, audio, photography and text. When the course was closed in 1986, his full-time teaching career came to an end, and he retired to Dorset.
In 2010 a large exhibition entitled From Floor to Sky was held at the Ambika P3 gallery in central London to commemorate his career. Many of his former students, now celebrated artists including Richard Long, Alison Wilding and Richard Deacon, contributed to the tribute.
Peter was a socialist throughout his life, and his essential character, which I was to observe not only as one of his students but later as a colleague at the Royal College of Art, combined a forceful intellect grounded in extensive reading of philosophy with an abiding fascination with the antics of the genuinely creative artist.
He is survived by his wife, Carolyne (nee Fitzgibbon), an artist whom he met at St Martin’s and married in 1975, and by two children, Jane and Roland, from his first marriage to Georgina (nee Hunt), also an artist, which ended in divorce in 1972.
