MICHAEL MASON

Our 15 October Autumn Interiors sale will feature the collection of sculptor Michael Mason (1935-2023), Fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors, a Fellow of Sculpture at the British School in Rome, and Principal Lecturer in Sculpture at Manchester Metropolitan University 1982-1996. You have likely seen his work, in exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, or peering down at you from the top of the Hackney Empire.

Born in Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire, Mason studied sculpture and ceramics at Manchester College of Art and Design. It was here that he met his wife Barbara who is also a technically accomplished artist.  At the time art schools had more teaching specialists which allowed students to acquire a firm grounding across the spectrum of disciplines and materials. Barbara became a painter whereas Michael focused on studio sculpture.  Before moving into primarily ceramic work, he used recycled timber to create large-scale pieces like 1977’s ‘Agincourt’; a series of wooden planes slicing through space. It is simultaneously playful and brutal, a bit like a perilous climbing frame. Another large timber piece, also widely exhibited at the time, is called ‘Spectra’ and is reminiscent of a loom.

Michael was driven primarily by an artist’s urge to create, but he also enjoyed exhibiting. He has a weighty portfolio of exhibition catalogues dating back to the 1960s detailing his many solo and group shows at the Serpentine, the Arts Council, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Scottish Sculpture Trust and many more. His work has been reviewed extensively in such magazines as the Arts Review, Art International and Ceramics Review and his pieces are in many private and public collections around the world, including the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Victoria & Albert Museum. In 1976, he spent a year at the British School in Rome, where he drew inspiration from Quattrocento paintings and Enzo Mari, the Italian modernist and furniture designer. In 1990, he won the Titograd Prize at the third World Triennale of Ceramics in the Croatian capital Zagreb.

Mason taught at the Metropolitan University of Manchester from 1982 to 1996 becoming Principal lecturer in sculpture. The university gave him a paid break from teaching every Wednesday so that he could sculpt in his studio in Hale. In 1989 he and a colleague were commissioned to create a replacement 7ft high statue of a classical figure to sit on the top of the Hackney Empire (the original had been damaged and lost). They made two, in case one broke in the kiln. She is still up there today and is one of Mason’s numerous architectural commissions.

The sculptor’s work also took him farther afield, undertaking several extended periods of work and research in South America. ‘Bridge Fish’ in the October auction is from his 1993 ‘Caroni Series’, named after the tributary of the Orinoco and produced as a result of residencies in Venezuela. He explained that he took inspiration from ‘mysterious places, exotic cultures, history, physics, strange animals, myths and legends’. Visiting exotic places conversely also gave him inspiration from Saddleworth Moor, and other landscapes closer to home. He was interested to see home from a visitor’s perspective.

There are architectural references and organic influences in the work. Look for long enough and you may see dinosaurs or cooling towers. There are columns and horns, bottle ovens and chimney pots, bleached bones and brick.  In his own words; “The clays, the heat, the oxides and even the water used to form the things I make are in many ways equivalent to the forces which originally shaped the earth. It is with this in mind that I make sculpture and ceramics”.

Mason read Lao Tzu and trained and taught T’ai Chi Chuan and Chi Kung (which may be considered the physical representations of Taoist philosophy) commenting that he used “principles similar to these systems when making sculpture”.

Commissions and his work as a lecturer supported him and he had a (possibly northern) degree of humility and reticence when it came to pushing his work commercially during his lifetime. Instead he was continually driven to create what he considered to be ‘the perfect work’. You can see the scholarly experiments in glazes and forms in the exquisite pots within his collection. In the months prior to his passing, when he was in his late eighties, he doodled intensely in hospital and requested clay. The drawings look a lot like diagrams for sculptures.

The Michael Mason Collection of 65 lots of original sculpture and ceramics will be offered within the 15 October Autumn Interiors Auction at Dore & Rees. The sale presents a unique opportunity to acquire an original work by an acclaimed influential sculptor with a prestigious exhibition record and architectural legacy.