My father, Peter Hand, who has died aged 95, was an artist and teacher whose work ranged from large-scale public artworks – which he called “play sculptures” – to a long, personal series of meticulously detailed dioramas.
For 20 years from the mid-1960s, when he was a lecturer at Bournemouth College of Art, Peter was commissioned to produce a large number of sculptural works for shopping centres and other public spaces. Huge animals made in wood, steel or fibreglass, these were beautiful works of art for children – made to be touched, climbed on, dived into and slid through.
Starting with three large animals at the Arndale Centre (now the Dolphin Centre) in Poole, Peter was soon commissioned by other local authorities, and so enormous ducks appeared in Aylesbury, crustaceans were installed in Southend, toads in Wood Green, caterpillars in Brent Cross, and at least six gargantuan creatures arrived in Nottingham to entertain generations of passersby.
Graduating as a specialist in sculpture from Goldsmiths College school of art in London, Peter had spent the 1950s as a professional artist in various positions, including as a stonemason in the restoration of Southwell Minster in Nottinghamshire, and as chief modeller at MGM Studios in Borehamwood.
There he worked on props and decor in such films as The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958), starring Ingrid Bergman, A Touch of Larceny (1959), with James Mason, and the British “creature feature” Gorgo (1961), for which Peter created the monster – including its “twitching ears,” which have made the film a cult favourite with B-movie fans ever since.
In 1960, Peter joined Bournemouth College of Art, where he lectured until the mid-1980s when he emigrated to Italy for nearly a decade. His work as a teacher never diminished his professional output.
In stark contrast to the play sculptures, for many decades until near the end of his life Peter undertook a more personal project of dioramas inspired by Jungian psychology. These mystical works drew on Etruscan art as much as the pre-Raphaelites, and the arcane imagery of hermaphrodites and mandalas as well as Victorian poetry and classical music. Made in fibreglass to an astonishingly high level of detail, some were exhibited in Parma, Zurich and, on more than one occasion, at the Royal Academy summer exhibition.
Peter wrote about his life in three volumes of memoirs. He was born in Cambridge, the son of Daisy (nee Rose) and Frank Hand. When his parents divorced in the mid-1930s, he remained in the custody of his father, who became the cemeteries superintendent (and a wartime air warden) for Redhill and Reigate, in Surrey.
Peter went to Reigate grammar school and then did national service in the late 1940s; while on leave he met Margaret Abbott on a seaside trip to Clacton-on-Sea. They were married for nearly 20 years, and had four sons. Although the marriage ended in divorce they always remained amicable.
Peter is survived by his sons, David, Mark, Stephen and me, and by nine grandchildren.
