Art of the Maker: Ben Mazey

The New Zealand designer’s artistic vision has taken nearly two decades to come to fruition with his creative experiences expressed in graphic and irreverent ceramic pieces.

Step into Ben Mazey’s Sydney warehouse studio and home and you will see the hallmarks of someone whose life and being buzz with creativity. It’s there in the custom candle holder built into the kitchen table, the eclectic curation of contemporary and pre-loved pieces and the display of vintage interiors magazines and personal knick-knacks from living abroad. Most of all, creativity is seen in the expansive adjacent studio where tables are uniformly laden with glazed ceramic works in various states of progress.

Step into Ben Mazey’s Sydney warehouse studio and home and you will see the hallmarks of someone whose life and being buzz with creativity.

For Mazey, this space is the cultivation of an artistic practice that has taken flight and found a nest alongside his fashion career. And home for this New Zealand native is where it all started. “I am definitely not a nepo baby when it comes to the creative industry,” says the imminently quotable artist. “But in saying this, I had this sickeningly idyllic childhood; I grew up in a national park – my dad was a ranger and worked on ski resorts. But from the get-go, I had always just wanted to be a creative – it was all I remember as a kid, drawing and painting. I vividly remember when I was five thinking, ‘I’m going to be a fashion designer or an artist.’”

A carefree childhood gave way to the harsh realities of the world during his early adulthood. “As a queer individual, I hit school and suppressed all that,” says Mazey, “and then actually didn’t dip my toe into fashion until I was in my mid-twenties after a few years of therapy.” After a final school year on exchange in Italy, heading back to New Zealand to complete a fast-tracked art degree and then returning to Italy to study photography and art history, Mazey started his fashion career in earnest. “I was working as a photographer, but I was telling my friends and family that I wanted to go to fashion school and it kind of felt harder than coming out. And then it just felt like a real, natural fit once I did.”

He worked for the late British-born Australian designer Richard Nicoll, whose contemporaries include fellow Central Saint Martins graduates Christopher Kane and Jonathan Saunders.

His decision led to a summer internship in London that turned into a job. In a time that he earmarks as “the Saltburn soundtrack era”, he worked for the late British-born Australian designer Richard Nicoll, whose contemporaries include fellow Central Saint Martins graduates Christopher Kane and Jonathan Saunders. “I was blown away as there was just so much camaraderie where we were doing these full-blown shows at Fashion Week, front-facing in the studio on the smell of an oily rag. But it was a special time and something that I am really thankful for.”

Mazey’s five years in London culminated in his role as design director at Kenzo, where he stayed for a fast-paced seven years, traversing between the City of Light and the Big Apple before “packing up everything in 2018, putting my stuff on a boat to Melbourne and going home through Shanghai where I had three days for Christmas”. Three days turned into a year, an unseen but necessary pause that the creative likens to scuba diving: “You go 20 metres or so and then you stop a few metres below the surface and decompress, wait, then you finish your journey to the top. I honestly feel my year in Shanghai was like that on my way back to this part of the world.”

Mazey’s work also has similarities in spirit to that of a creative hero of his, the late Gaetano Pesce.

He landed in Melbourne just as the pandemic hit and turned to art. His thought process around lockdown was, “‘Okay, I’m just going to pretend I’m on a residency and that’s what I’m going to do with my time for the foreseeable future because I’m not working’, so I got art supplies and started painting and making stuff on the balcony. And then it just escalated – the house was just a full studio. It was amazing, covered in stuff that I’d be making, so then I was like, ‘I guess I’ll Google art studios in Melbourne,’ found a place in Brunswick and just had a really delicious time.”

The fruits of his labour from this “delicious time” garnered a following on social media – lamps, vases and candlesticks that look plucked straight out of The Flintstones’ living room, almost prehistoric in form and irrepressibly joyful in appeal. “The clunkiness of it – it was early days of the practice – but it’s something that I still really believe in,” he says. Mazey’s work also has similarities in spirit to that of a creative hero of his, the late Gaetano Pesce: “He was all about anti-perfectionism and wanting to feel the hand in something,” says Mazey of Pesce. Mazey’s coveted flags – “which have become sort of a language on their own” – feature painterly glazed experiments across a reasoned series of ripples that lend calming graphic appeal through geometric juxtaposition.

“I still think I’m quite accidentally a sculptor, designer, whatever you want to call it,” he says, adding that the progression of his creative journey is serendipitous.

Earlier this year, Mazey’s pieces were selected for a show in Paris curated by India Mahdavi and he has another solo show slated at C. Gallery as well as a group show at Michael Reid Galleries. “I still think I’m quite accidentally a sculptor, designer, whatever you want to call it,” he says, adding that the progression of his creative journey is serendipitous. “The trajectory has been pretty quick, but I’ve spent almost 20 years doing this research, living in all these places and absorbing all this stuff. So then once I started, I thought, ‘Here’s my output, this isa lot, I’m ready to go.’