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In 1981 the artist David Kemp went to live in Cornwall, settling in the village of Botallack, on a rugged, far-western clifftop, capped by a clutter of ruined tin mines. He adapted an old building to use as a workshop, and began painting old furniture with crazy, surrealistic scenes of temples, sea views, beasts and breasts.

Although this sold well, he became increasingly interested in the rubbish he found lying around. The old mine had been used by all and sundry as a tip. There were, he quipped, “more fridges here than foxes”. Kemp, who has died aged 80, was soon creating art out of junk, fantastic beasts and mystic beings, and began to imagine he had stumbled across the detritus of a long-lost prehistoric cult.

A fabulous fantasy formed in his mind, that he was a 34th-century archaeologist digging through a crust on the earth’s surface to discover the shattered remains of an ancient civilisation (our own). He reassembled bits of agricultural machinery, cars, tail-lights, televisions, washing machines, wheels, engines, dustbin lids, whatever, to create images of what he thought this lost culture’s gods and goddesses must have looked like, and the myths the ancient people who had made these things believed in.

In a shed on the site, he began to create what he called the Museum of the Future. The precious artefacts were exhibited in showcases and, when too big, on plinths, freestanding. Labels explained how these ancient people had made poles that held the sky up, and harnessed fire to turn night into day. But one day, their fire had escaped and burned a hole in the sky. They had dug deep pits underground to escape the terror, and their culture had been buried for centuries, till now.

In 1997, he installed this museum, now called the Art of Darkness, in the Botallack Count House, courtesy of the National Trust, for a year before they turned the building into a visitor centre – the only museum I’ve ever been in that echoed with its visitors’ laughter.

Kemp received many commissions for public sculptures across the UK – 38 between 1982 and 2011, some of them immense. In 1989, he built two colossal figures, both over 20ft high, of a miner and an ironmaster, called The Old Transformers. They stare, from a sloping hillside in County Durham, over a site that once teemed with the clanging factories and smoke-billowing chimneys of the Consett ironworks, one of the largest foundries in the world, swept away in the early 1980s. Now Kemp’s two heads, built of engines and transformers salvaged from the factories, stare over the flat, empty land like two Easter Island gods, moving tributes to the workers who built Britain’s industrial age.

When the Geevor tin mine in Cornwall was closed in 1990, after being worked for about 200 years, Kemp saved some old miners’ boots that were being shovelled into a pit, not sure what to do with them. They became his yapping, laughing dog sculptures Tinner’s Hounds, some of them now cast in bronze in Tatty Square, Redruth, the “capital” of Cornish tin mining.

For the Eden Project, a sequence of ecological domes in a disused china-clay pit in Cornwall, Kemp created a number of artworks, including an exquisite Garden of Plastic Delights, an ironic replay of Hieronymus Bosch, full of flexi-plants made of land-drain pipes, with disused compact discs in their flower heads, sparkling in the light. Kemp can be thought of as a Bosch for our time – an outsider artist who built up a imaginative and playful picture of the world that broke through artistic conventions.

The eldest of the four sons of Dorothy (nee Green) and Lesley Kemp, an air traffic controller, David was born in London. As a child, he watched the ships sail by on the Thames – his dream was to be on one. As soon as he left Farnham grammar school, he joined the merchant navy. Four years later, having travelled the world, he happened to look over the side as his ship sailed down the Thames, and saw the place where he had stood as a boy. Determined to keep dreaming, he quit the navy at once and went to art school, first Wimbledon and then Farnham.

One of his earliest and most popular sculptures, The Navigators (1986), is a 60ft-high sailing tower, which he described as “an iron fish dreaming of voyages past through typhoons and pack ice”, in Hays Galleria, near London Bridge – the fantasies of his boyhood replayed.

In 1977 he married Mercedes Esteban Maes, a lecturer in fine art at Falmouth University. She and their son, George, and granddaughter, Ula, survive him.

• David George Kemp, artist, born 4 July 1945; died 30 May 2026