Stephen Cripps died in 1982 at the age of 29. He built things – strange mobile contraptions, self-destroying sculptures, one-off performances involving fire and sound – and he blew things up. Mysterious and anarchically original, his art was as evanescent as his life.
Cripps lived for most of his brief career in a shed inside an abandoned warehouse in Butler’s Wharf by Tower Bridge in London. Friends remember the welding pit where he soldered scrap metal, the collection of Indian and Chinese gongs, the two halves of a fighter-plane cockpit. He built a record player that crawled along the floor at parties as it turned. A colossal Heath-Robinson construction for scattering birds that tried to perch on its elegant Paul Klee structure was installed outside the Serpentine Gallery in 1975.
