Keith Newstead obituary

Keith Newstead, who has died aged 64 of cancer, was the UK’s pre-eminent maker of automata – artistic mechanical devices that are built to look like human or animal figures and which give the illusion of acting as if under their own power.

Newstead had a straightforward, even humble relationship with his chosen artform. Although his work drew on a rich tradition of makers of kinetic art from Leonardo da Vinci to Jean Tinguely, he considered himself an entertainer as much as an artist, and was unconcerned with raising the status of automata as sculpture. Instead he wanted, as he put it in 2015, to “bring enjoyment and entertainment to both young and old alike.”

His assemblages were ingenious, irreverent, playful and accessible – sometimes educational and often purposeful. Humour and story were essential to his work, whether in Don Quixote Attacking Puppets With His Sword (1997), in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1993), in which a city worker on a train full of commuters transforms into an alien, or in the many automated donation boxes he made for various museums and visitor attractions from 2000 onwards.

In his orderly workshop in Falmouth, Cornwall, Newstead built such magical worlds with wire, wood and paint, revelling in the combination of art, craft, graphics and engineered movement, bringing characters to life at the turn of a handle or push of a button and helping to cement the town’s reputation as the home of automata. His work can be found in museums, galleries, private collections and shops around the world – including the Exploratorium in San Francisco, the Tokyo Toy Museum, the Science Museum and the Eden Project.

Born in Romford, Essex, Keith was the son of George Newstead, a plumber, and his wife, Stella (nee Guy). Showing artistic talent at Pettits secondary school, he cited the machines he saw in seaside penny arcades at Southend as a key early influence on his work. It fascinated him as a boy that an inserted penny could kickstart an animated story.

After completing a diploma in graphic design at Barking College of Technology he worked for five weeks in a design studio before leaving due to “extreme boredom”. He turned down a place at the Royal Academy Schools, unable to see himself in the conventional art world, and instead went to live in a squat in Camden, north London, becoming a motorcycle despatch rider for a decade, during which time he made jewellery that he sold from a stall at Greenwich Market and at the West End department store Liberty.

It was during this time in the 1980s that he saw a TV film on the automata maker Sam Smith. “My early fascination with those machines flooded back to me and I immediately started to make my own,” he said. With no books available, Newstead taught himself by taking things apart to see how they worked. He started with simple pieces depicting characters doing unlikely things, including a pinstriped city gent at a disco.

In 1990 he took some of his work into Cabaret Mechanical Theatre, an automata collection then housed in Covent Garden. They took on some of his pieces as permanent exhibits and commissioned him to make some more for sale. This enabled him to give up despatch riding to concentrate full time on automata, working from studio space at the South Bank Craft Centre, Charing Cross.

Despite the intricacy of his work, Newstead did minimal planning and began with flashes of inspiration: “things I see in the street, things I dream about and sometimes a funny idea will just pop into my head and I’ll try and make it.” This modus operandi ensured that his work remained fresh, each storyline encapsulated in a short timeframe of minutes and seconds.

As his reputation built, he began to collaborate with other artists, including Ralph Steadman, Terry Gilliam and Sam Lanyon. He was commissioned to make two characters for the 2013 film Deception, and created a prototype design for the British Eccentric garden at the Chelsea flower show in 2016. He became part of a British lineage in automata that included Rowland Emett, Smith and Paul Spooner, but his reputation also grew worldwide, from Japan to the US.

As demand for Newstead’s work grew in the mid-90s, his personal life changed. In 1995 he moved from London to Falmouth with his then wife, Christina (nee Bunce), and their young daughter, Dora, working daily in his studio with a large window on to the street that enabled children to peer through in wonderment.

He was renowned as a fast and accurate maker, working on hugely complex pieces while never losing sight of detail and the need to experiment. “Sometimes they worked out, sometimes they didn’t,” he said, with characteristic modesty.

Alongside his many one-off pieces, Newstead also designed for manufactured editions, including model kits made from cardboard, later wood, that allowed members of the public to assemble their own automata built to Newstead’s design. One of these kits, the Executioner, was stocked in the Tower of London shop from 1993 onwards and has sold more than 100,000 copies there alone. A bespoke commission for Northampton Shoe Museum showed an old-fashioned cobbler at a bench next to a shoemaking robot. With a coin inserted, the cobbler hammers nails into a shoe, while in turn the robot turns a handle to operate a shoe machine, which malfunctions as the wise shoemaker shakes his head.

He also worked to literary themes, and one of his most memorable pieces is his masterly depiction of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast (2018), currently to be seen at Falmouth Art Gallery. He regularly taught in schools, and also appeared on children’s TV art programmes such as SMart.

Newstead’s marriage to Christina ended in divorce in 2004. He is survived by his second wife, Concha Fernandez, whom he married in 2016, by Dora, and by Concha’s sons, Alistair and Antonio.

• Keith Martin Newstead, artist, born 4 March 1956; died 8 November 2020