Piers Mason

Piers Mason

Piers Mason is a talented sculptor with a passion for art and how art can empower people, he has spent significant periods overseas, especially in Africa, and as a result he acts as an Art Consultant for income generating community projects in developing countries, serves as Project Director and facilitator on VSO Vocational Arts and Crafts project in Kenya and is a Founder, Director and Trainer for a fair trade community Art and Craft project empowering Masai women in Kenya.

Mason’s works are highly detailed animal sculptures that recently consist of very complex hand worked metal birds, his most iconic piece is a pair of crested cranes which he was inspired to make after a trip to Kenya. His works are both traditional and conceptual, if that was ever possible, he hides the conceptual element within the traditional sculptural shell, ie. Inside the body of his creatures lies a concept that forms the purpose of his body of work. 

His work is thought provoking, the level of sophistication involved to design a piece of work in which the key point in not visible requires an understanding of today’s art world that you cannot simply teach. His knowledge of not only how to appeal to galleries, dealers and collectors by creating such beautifully crafted works but to appeal on another level entirely allows his work to be more than just a beautiful object and more an in depth artwork that can communicate a vast array of meanings and messages to the audience. 

Piers Mason view on the conceptual side of his work was given in an interview with Monica Ramos, Art writer and critic for Madrid Publications in April 2012, she writes:

Within the framework of each bird the artist has placed a stone, suspended inside the body. “The apparently lifeless form of a stone...” is the reason for his work, the artist explains. “Sub-atomic particle physics leads us to particles being vibrating waveforms appearing as dense formations of matter. All this ‘matter’ is alive and essentially made of the same “stuff", he adds.

The stones provide a metaphor - that if we break everything down to its simplest constituents, as science tries to do, then it becomes clear that everything is the same and equal. 

Becoming aware of this link with everything is a massive leap in human evolution and consciousness - a place where science and religion meet.

Thus the boundaries merge, between the form of these meticulously crafted birds and the philosophy encapsulated within the stone, enticing our visual senses and triggering compassion for an endangered species. At the same time, we are led to ponder on the world of which we are an intrinsic part.

Piers Mason’s work marriages traditional and conceptual thinking, his work embodies the changes in thinking within the art world that allows artists not to be categorised as a single source of creator but as a person who can dabble with multiple methods, across a varied discipline of materials and techniques and all used to create works that don’t forge a single subject but blur the boundaries between all waves of thinking.