79 Barlby Road, W10 6AZ, London, United Kingdom
Open: Tue-Sat 10am-6pm
Artist: Gareth Mason
Flights of Fancy is an exhibition by British ceramic artist Gareth Mason, who is known for his highly tactile treatment of the ceramic vessel. Opening at Carpenters in London, the exhibition, whose title refers to the fanciful nature of the waking imagination, features seven new works that advance Mason’s singular approach to the ceramic palette. In these works, we see molded and punctured pale porcelain, dark, rugged stoneware, liquid glazes and thermally transformed granite all brought into action through a combination of wheel-throwing, free-form construction and multiple-firing.
The medium of ceramics is shaped by many common conventions with which Mason has consistently engaged over his four-decade career, particularly those surrounding the perceived purity of porcelain. For him, these standards offer fertile ground for experimentation. Entangling material risk and irreverence with an innate respect for the medium's history, Mason develops restless tensions and surreal contradictions that defy straightforward resolution.
In Flights of Fancy, notions of completion are upended as the work remains open to intervention and change. Firing remains a provisional act for Mason, often with its more hazardous outcomes exposed. This uncertain terrain resonates with the concept of flux, which functions as a central principle within his practice. This dynamic parallels the transformative geological processes that forge the clay and glaze materials he employs but at a human scale. Beyond this material correspondence, the metamorphosis made visible through these works invites associations that are intimate, personal and unfolding.
Among the new works in the exhibition is Quarry, which evokes Mason's selective mining of pottery’s history, the materials themselves, and the possibilities of porcelain to continually renew his own artistic process. Two additional works — Dolomea and Obsidra — are familial in form, but not in nature. Generously bellied; they recall time-honoured ideas of containment and utility but quickly belie the association. Dolomea's cool, cloud-glazed surface is incongruously embedded with golden granite impacts; its rim is a fractious combination of a heavy basalt-like slab and the repurposed shards of a work from earlier in Mason's career. Obsidra's iron-rich surface is blistered and traversed by tar-like runnels and rivulets of bright glaze. Two harsh granite inclusions imply collision or extrusion: one of which appears stitched in place by dark metal staples, evidence of Mason’s alchemical process of continuous invention.
Flights of Fancy demonstrates Mason’s belief that pottery is a medium of expression comparable to cinema, opera or poetry in its potential to entrance, delight and move the spirit. Through Mason's distinct ceramic language, he celebrates the pot’s status as an object of myriad meanings. In these works, clay is handled with muscular delicacy and discerning disfigurement, where consummate control dallies with disaster, where form expands under pressure, and where whimsy vies with the weight of ceramic lineage.
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