New Ben Mazey Exhibition at C. Gallery
Sydney artist Ben Mazey debuts a series of signature ceramic word poems, and a striking faux fireplace, as part of a new exhibition, May the Burns I Bridge White the Lay, at Melbourne’s C. Gallery.
In May the Burns I Bridge White the Lay, the New Zealand-born, Sydney-based artist Ben Mazey leans into contradiction with gusto. On view at C. Gallery in South Yarra, Melbourne, this exhibition – his fifth with the gallery – upends expectations of form and materials with curling, rippling, monumental and playfully restaged ceramic works fusing abstraction with beauty and humour.
The title, a slanted spoonerism that invites misreading, is the first inkling of Mazey’s new range of signature ceramic ‘word poems’, mounted on the gallery’s walls like homey, domestic aphorisms viewed through a Lewis Carroll-like looking glass. One, a cream glazed earthenware piece with black lines, declares ‘Helcome Wome’. Another, the show’s title laid in four segmented sections, inspires the viewer to mentally move these words around like an unsolved puzzle.
In many of the works, Mazey’s background in fashion and design – he was a previous design director at Kenzo in Paris – brings a fabric sensibility to the way he nudges, kinks and ruches the glazed raku, stoneware and earthenware on display.
Wall-mounted pieces such as Pink Midas Light Totem, its undulating layers resembling glossy pink pasta, face tall stand-alone totems, their balanced circles featuring a golden lustre and reddish brown gloss that ends abruptly at the midline. Framed Triple Fur Breath and Shredded Rust Flag, meanwhile, bring to mind thick rippled silk, their corrugations frozen but somehow soft.
The heart of the exhibition may be Mazey’s glazed-stoneware fireplace, a life-size theatrical anchor piece with embedded flower vases. It is absurd and touching: a hearth that offers no heat, but glows with beauty and suggestion. This familiar domestic centrepiece appears almost distorted, an oscillating structure that feels like it’s being viewed through water or the heat of a roaring fire.
Wings, a pair of oversized raku panels glazed with a shimmering platinum lustre, frame one of the gallery doorways. A reference to Mazey’s younger self, and the pain of masking one’s true nature, it is perhaps one of the most vulnerable works in the show. “In making these giant silver wings … I really wanted to lean into the notion of camp in a queer sense – as a little homage to younger me who would have had far too much internalised homophobia to attempt something so flamboyant,” Mazey says. “These are for him.”
In May the Burns I Bridge White the Lay, each piece plays and explores ideas of duality and masking. Works are shimmering and raw, or subverting the domestic via sculptures that present familiar household objects with gently contorted edges and shapes. But perhaps central to it all is Ted, a cream and blue glazed earthenware work depicting Mazey’s beloved rescue dog. With a blue halo above, his ears flopped beyond a whiskered nose, he stares at the viewer with steady loyalty.
May the Burns I Bridge White the Lay continues at C. Gallery, 50 Davis Avenue, South Yarra, until 28 August.
