Starleaf

 

Commissioned by Nene College, Northampton, 1992

Starleaf is one of a number of smaller public commissions Paul received throughout his career.  This work rehearses several ongoing themes and deploys carved and polished faces typical of works made at that time.

The Beeston 'Stump'

 

Water-Head, Beeston, 2025

I've written before about the difficulties faced by artists making 'public sculpture'. With a substantial number of commissions Paul Mason was all too familiar with both the processes and controversies surrounding the installation of works.  None more so than the above 'Water-Head' commissioned by Nottinghamshire in 1988.  Right from the start there were substantial issues around the piece and its original location in this satellite of Nottingham.  In the first instance, like Leaf Stem in the city centre, it was envisaged as having a fountain through its core that would see water cascading gently over its surface.

Original location - photo credit: Akhtar Khan/Art UK

And like the work in the City Centre, that was decommissioned in the early 90's as UK winds whipped the water off the surface and onto passers by adding a physical dimension to viewers aesthetic displeasure!  However despite it all the work remained in place for quite a time but redevelopment saw its future very uncertain.  Step forward Tamar Feast, a local resident and (since 2018) Trustee of Beeston & District Civic Society).  Tamar first contacted me in 2012 when she wrote in The Beestonian newspaper a passionate defence of the work outlining its history and kickstarted a campaign to have it re-sited rather than thrown on the scrapheap.  

So all credit, to Tamar, first & foremost, abetted by fellow trustees, local government officials and members for the re siting of the work adjacent to the Hoton - City Centre Tram line that now sees Paul's work at two locations (the other being a black marble work outside Lakeside Arts Centre by the University of Nottingham campus).  As I write this I'm getting set to go to a re-dedication of the piece this very day!  And here we are...on Saturday 25th January at 3.30 pm.  Introduced by (on left) Mervyn Brown, Hon. Sec & Trustee of the Beeston & District Civic Society, myself (centre) and Tamar Feast (on right).

 

Leaf Stem

In the mid 1980's Mason was one of a small group of locally based artists chosen to create public artworks for an initiative jointly stimulated by Nottingham City and Nottinghamshire County councils.  With support from East Midlands Arts, through advice from the Visual Arts Officer David Manley, City Technical Services Director John Haslam selected a number of proposals for consideration.  Paul Mason had produced a small maquette in marble for a large work that he envisaged in the same material that would take the form of a fountain. 

Original maquette

This was chosen (alongside pieces by Richard Perry & Hilary Cartmel) to be in the vanguard of an ambitious scheme of re-envisaging the city (to include better street furniture, plantings and surfaces) along the lines of other Continental cities that Haslam had seen on recent excursions to Germany and elsewhere.  For Mason it required a deal of research and the eventual contracting of an Italian marble quarry to supply the stone.  As importantly it further stimulated an interest in Italy and particularly in the marble quarries and the Apuan Alps region of northern Tuscany.  

Following initial visits the artist dispatched the maquette to the workshop in Italy where a phone call suggested the masons there "might rough the stone out" following the form from the piece sent through to them.  The artist was therefore surprised to arrive in Italy to find the piece very nearly completed!  The photo above shows the stone when the artist arrived in the yard...and the one below as sited in Nottingham.  Mason recalled that the workers in the yard told the story of Henry Moore similarly finding a piece virtually completed.  On that occasion the press were invited and with a photo of the 'maestro' about to be taken of him 'finishing' the piece with chisel in hand...the master carver of the yard stepped forward advising that he was holding it at the wrong angle!  Anyone who has visited Carrara, Massa or Pietrasanta and seen some of the exotic pieces carved from this material will see just how complex some of the work can be. 

marble Fiat!

The sited work has been controversial from the beginning.  Like the Beeston piece Water Head, it has been much discussed.  My contribution to this can be found here, in an interview with Tamar Feast.

Vertex

Commisioned in 1979 Vertex is the first of the artist's many public works.  Sited in the centre of Harlow New Town on the Broad Walk the piece is in remarkably good condition as seen on the day of my visit (July 2017).  This is in no small part to the choice of a dove grey bardolino marble sourced from Carrara. 

Piece for Lakeside

This is a piece made for, and recently re-installed, at the Lakeside Arts Centre at Nottingham University following the extensive tram developments.  Its an elegant work in black marble and dates from the period following the artist's relocation from Cheltenham to London following the residency at Gloucester Cathedral.  When originally sited next to the small pond at the city side of the Centre the sympathetic mature shrubbery around it shielded it from the busy dual carriageway.  At present it is a little more exposed, however the replanting should take care of this as it develops and the work benefits from good views from the passing tram.

Ideally the piece might also benefit from re-gilding though given the age of the work it has stood up to the elements quite well.

Tarpey Sculpture Garden

Three pieces of Paul's marble sculptures are going on display in the newly created Sculpture Garden at Leicestershire's Tarpey Galleryhttp://tarpeygallery.com. The opening of the garden takes place on Saturday 11th July, 2015 from 2 to 6pm.  One is from the period of his residency at the Tate St. Ives and two more from the early 2000's in preparation for the exhibition at Quay Arts on the Isle of Wight in 2005.

All At Sea

This piece was exhibited in the exhibition 'The Cutting Edge' - Sculpture 1977 - 87 that opened in Bolton Museum & Art Gallery on 11th April 1987 and subsequently toured to the Usher Gallery, Lincoln and Wolverhampton Art Gallery. It is in the collection of Lady Patricia Gibberd, an early supporter of Mason's work following the commission by her husband , Sir Frederick Gibberd, for Harlow New Town.

The piece utilises a fragment of Carrara Marble, a frequent decision to exploit the naturally occurring shape of the material within which a dynamic formal construction emerges. Like many works from this period the forms are in part determined by the internal relationships between them with just the suggestion of externally arrived at characteristics. This ambiguity of form and subsequent meaning is often found in much of work of the artist. Equally evident is the delight in the interplay between the surface finishes, the rough chisel marked with that of the flat polished. It is also an early example of the occasional introduction of other material, paint and lead, that crops up sporadically in work over the years. The sculpture is approximately 14" high.

Harbour, 1983 is a small landscape based relief, some 7" in height. In the essay of the catalogue for the exhibition 'The Cutting Edge' (Bolton Museum & Gallery and touring, 1987) Peter Wheeler said

(it) is a small and spontaneous looking piece. Its size and apparent rapidity of execution contradict conventional notions of carved sculpture as difficult and long-winded. For Mason, working against inherited ideas either of technique or purpose and expectations of stone, is a way of remaining alive to its potential, and extending its language.

Artist's Project - Tate St. Ives/Barbara Hepworth Museum

Between May and September 1996 Paul was invited to exhibit a series of sculptures, drawings and a 'didactic display' at Tate St. Ives. The published brochure explains that

At the heart of the project was an invitation to Paul Mason to also make a new carving from uncut stone remaining in Barbara Hepworth's studio. As with a previous project with the sculptor Peter Randall-Page, this element of the project was made possible by the generosity of the Trustees of the Barbara Hepworth Estate and the artist's family, who make available this stone.

He was extremely grateful for the opportunity to work this piece of stone - and even more excited by the opportunity to do so in the small garage studio opposite the entrance to the home of the artist. Paul wrote of the experience

It was not intimidating to work on this piece of marble in the sense that it was once Hepworth's. However the proportions of the block are 4' 6" by 18" by 12", and so I felt as though it was ordered for a particular purpose. I know when I am ordering marble, if you are ordering a solid block you try and get it as cheaply as you can, to get the maximum out of the order. Often blocks are evenlu proportioned. These distinct proportions made me think that she either ordered blocks for specific pieces or she regularly ordered blocks that size. This definitely had, for example, a front and back. It had distinct axes. I was conscious of these being her decisions.

Amongst the works was an installation entitled Strata, shown above, of which the artist wrote

The courtyard installation Strata which is three pitched slabs of granite balanced on white marble chippings with molten lead poured into incised lines, is on one level a formal response to the classicism of the architecture and space itself providing a counterpoint in its brutal, physical shaping, as well as combining the granite - igneous, fire formed - with marble - heat and pressure formed, originally laid down on the ocean floor as eroded sedimentary material.

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'.

Introduction

This is a site devoted to the collection and dissemination of material related to the life and work of the sculptor, Paul William Mason (1952 - 2006). Perhaps best known for his public works of which Leafstem, pictured above, is a notable early example this site is intended to collect together the majority of his works over a career that began in the 1970's and continued until his untimely death and covered a wide range of sculptures, drawings and other media. Leafstem was commissioned by Nottingham City and County Councils under the direction of the City's farsighted Director of Technical Services, John Haslam in the early 1980's.