Keith Newstead: Automata artist who brought mechanical sculpture to a wider audience

The craftsman delivered works of all sizes – and excelled in combining scientific and artistic principles

Newstead took inspiration from a diverse range of sources (Steve Tanner)

Keith Newstead was one of the leading makers of automata, animated sculptures of people and animals that appear to have a life of their own. Whether working on a small individual piece or large and complex installations, Newstead, who has died aged 64, found joy in designing and making his automata and in the fascination they brought from children and adults alike.

Speaking about the inspiration for his works, Newstead once said, “I get my ideas from all sorts of sources, comic books, things I see in the street, things I dream about and sometimes a funny idea will just pop into my head and if I like it I’ll make it.”

Keith Newstead was born in 1956 in Romford, Essex, the son of Stella and George Newstead, a plumber. As a child he would visit the Penny Arcade at Southend where he became fascinated by the mechanical slot machines and how they worked. He studied graphic design at Barking College of Technology but, as he later said, “got bored because nothing moved”, then became a motorcycle courier and sold handmade jewellery at Greenwich Market.

His autodidactic leap into the world of kinetic sculpture was sparked by seeing a film about the life and work of David Secrett, an artist and automaton maker. Taking apart automata by others, Newstead was able to determine how the simple machines moved and began creating small animated figures for himself.

“I found the mixture of art, craft, graphics and movement very exciting and it wasn’t long before I made my first piece,” Newstead recalled. “I took it to a shop in London called Cabaret Mechanical Theatre, which specialised in modern automata ... and the owner, the legendary Sue Jackson, said she liked it and would try to sell it for me, it sold in a few days.”

Founded in 1979, the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre (CMT) had begun life as a craft shop in the seaside town of Falmouth, Cornwall, and soon evolved into a miniature museum of animated curiosities, moving to London’s Covent Garden six years later. In both Falmouth and London, the CMT became a hub for a thriving community of automaton makers. Although the CMT closed its doors in 2000, the project lives on through worldwide travelling exhibitions of its automata collection.

Newstead lived and worked in Falmouth, the home of many other automata artists, including Carlos Zapata, Paul Spooner and the late Peter Markey. Spooner said in tribute: “I’d got used to Keith’s being just down the road setting a dreadful example of brilliance and productivity. No one else had a chance of keeping up.”

Falmouth Art Gallery has built an extensive collection of kinetic sculptures, including 13 pieces by Newstead. His large-scale works take their themes from people, events from history and literary works. For example, his interpretation of Gormenghast (2018) brings together numerous animated tableaux, each illustrating a room from the castle in Mervyn Peake’s gothic fantasy tale. He said of this automata, based on one of his favourite books, that the project “started out as an experiment using different materials and effects and went a bit crazy”.

Commenting on how the process of making automata combines both scientific and artistic principles, he said in an interview for a show at the Exploratorium in San Francisco: “You have to do a certain amount of planning ahead, and a certain amount of prototyping, and make sure everything’s going to fit in the box underneath, and the thing on top’s going to be in proportion with the box. It’s nice, the engineering and artistic bits coming together. People are usually either engineers or artists, but you don’t get many engineer/artists.”

Newstead had sought to bring automaton making to a wider audience through the use of ready-made kits, by which a novice could easily construct a moving model in wood or paper. His bestselling kit, the gruesomely titled “Executioner”, features an aristocrat kneeling on the scaffold with the executioner’s axe poised for decapitation. As the crank within the machine turns, the axe drops and the head falls. The model has sold more than 100,000 copies, many of those at the Tower of London.

Newstead is survived by his wife Concha Fernandez, whom he married in 2016, her two sons, Alistair and Antonio, and by his daughter Dora, from a previous marriage.

Keith Newstead, automaton maker, born 4 March 1956, died 8 November 2020