Keith Wilson - Sign for Art (Stelae 2014)

Born in Birmingham in 1965, Wilson studied at Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, from 1985-88. He took his MA at the Slade, before teaching at the Royal College of Art, and he soon established a reputation as a sculptor with significant solo exhibitions at Camden Arts Centre, Compton Verney and the Wellcome Collection. He is currently Professor of Sculpture at Sheffield Hallam University. Wilson's best-known public artwork is Steles (Waterworks), an installation for the Olympic Park (2012). His practice involves 'on-going enquiry into the contingency of meaning specifically in relation to the public functioning of sculpture'. Sign for Art (Stelae 2014) references Wilson's early years working as an art instructor for deaf-blind adults in the 1980s. 'Drawing two spaced fingertips in a wave motion across the forehead of the student - a tactile brainwave sign - announced the arrival of the artist, the subject of art and the imminent activity of making art,' he remembered. 'This modification of the British Sign Language, presumably derived from the making of a brushstroke, struck home and stayed with me,' he explained. Standing in the centre of the newly refurbished Beech Grove Plaza, the artwork has been affectionately christened by students as 'the squiggle'.