Stone Landscapes - A Geometry of Fracture

This exhibition took place at the Quay Arts Centre, Isle of Wight in the summer of 2005. In my introduction to the catalogue 'The Fruit That Grows In Man' I wrote:

In the first place there is something noble about bringing nature indoors, or of using it as a principle by which to structure an interior space; as an artistic engagement with the natural "order of things". In the second there is the sense of place, or more accurately places. For Paul Mason has been traveling again; Hoy, Malham Cove in Yorkshire, here in the Isle of Wight. Such travels open up places in his eyes and then ours, Malham Cove is a huge curving amphitheatre shaped cliff formation of limestone rock with a vertical face about 260 feet high. The top of the cove is a large area of deeply eroded limestone pavement, of a strange pattern rarely seen in England. No direct reference to this in the works but so many rich and pointed associations.

In this new work one is immediately struck by the close resemblance between the handmade marks and the depictions of leaves and branches, rocks and grains of sand, suggesting that there is a symmetrical relationship between nature and those who seek to order and shape it. And an imperfection here or there, for it is these that make perfect our imperfect view. The artist speaks of the 'binocular vision', how touch trades punches with what is visual. Not only on this occasion in stone sculptures, but in paintings, drawings, torn paper collage and wood relief too.

Whether in an Enlightened or a Romantic spirit, perhaps after Ruskin and following Stokes, every effort to order the natural environment is an act of deciphering, of a close and attentive reading. The work of Paul Mason offers a kind of second-order reading, a reading of the way we read nature. It's as simple and as complicated as that. The things that stand in the artist's study or decorate his walls are the things that evade his attempts at categorization. The rest is an uncharted wilderness.

Jean Arp, a constant source of inspiration for Mason, insisted that his sculpture was 'concrete' rather than 'abstract', since it occupied space, and that art was a natural generation of form: 'a fruit that grows in man', as he put it. How apt.

The work illustrated is a small marble work from 1996 entitled 'Wrapped Earth'.