Artist: Gareth Mason

Over the course of his expansive career, Gareth Mason has developed a distinctive practice that challenges conventional approaches to porcelain and ceramic art. His works often incorporate dissonant elements, including foreign objects and unprocessed materials, which disrupt the medium’s traditional boundaries while probing its transformative potential.

In The Spoil Heap, Mason embraces the fertile contradictions inherent in his medium, blurring the line between failure and success so it becomes unstable, negotiable. This uncertain terrain resonates with the concept of spoil, which functions not merely as a leitmotif for this body of work but as a central principle within his practice. Spoilage—both literal and metaphorical—is integral to the process: each act of making bears the risk of ruin, each accident the possibility of revelation.

The exhibition explores the multiplicities of clay: its abundance and generosity, its susceptibility to damage yet resistance to decay. To be “spoilt for choice” in clay is also to risk spoiling the work itself, compelling the artist to dig deeper for resolution. Through repeated firings and transformations, Mason finds vitality in imperfection—seeing spoil as both wreckage and treasure.

Celebrating clay’s expressive and emotive power, The Spoil Heap pays homage to the overlooked by-products of ceramic history—from industrial waste to kiln-born accidents—but Mason’s relationship with emotion, spoilage, and material isn’t sentimental; it’s alive, exploratory, embodied. In a word, flawed. It’s human. His works, he hopes, “bear the slag and clinker of experience – the patina of earth and ages.”