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Collectors Love - Mason Kimber
by Sharne Wolff
Art Collector Magazine - Issue 91
January 2020

Mason Kimber is interested in capturing the traces of memory found lingering in architectural spaces. Graduating with a Master of Fine Arts in 2013, Kimber has held a solo show in every year since. His first outing with Sophie Gannon Gallery in Melbourne was 2018’s Future Relics, where the gallery reportedy sold the majority of the show very quickly, some to earlier devotees and some to clients who were previously unaware of Kimber and his practice. Afternoon, Kimber’s most recent exhibition of fresco works, was a comlete sell-out.

A continuation of his curiosity in the materiality of surfaces, Kimber’s frescoes were based on digital collages and comprised a mixture of acrylic, sand, lime plaster and polystyrene on wood. While the works ooze the easy pleasures of the afternoon light, they also reflect Kimber’s interest in revealing the deep alliance between cognitive thought and place. Gallerist Sophie Gannon suggests that “Mason’s work is firmly grounded in traditional artistic methods (through his use of fresco, painting and sculpture) yet his approach and aesthetic is distinctly contemporary. He also explores timeless themes of memory, one’s connectedness and the physical spaces we inhabit - which is why I think his work resonates with curators and contemporary collectors.”

Making exciting strides in his practice, Kimber has recently started making sculptural reliefs - several of which were exhibited at Spring 1883 in Sydney last September, and selected for the 2019 Churchie National Emerging Art Prize. An extension of the frescoes, Kimber reveals that these new works began as studio experiments. Beginning with broken parts of painted frescoes cast into tablets, he found that “by rendering these objects into a single flat colour, they transform into unified sculptural forms rather than paintings...” adding that he enjoys “the idea of moving between pictorial and sculptural concerns”.

In late 2019, the Sydney-based artist headed to France to undertake a performative scultural commission with Paris’ Galerie Allen. The work was included in Prologue I, a multisite group exhibition that aired in December. Following his 2017 exhibition Arcades - made in homage to german literary critic Walter Benjamin’s incomplete 20th century Arcades Project - Kimber’s Paris project involves a site-specific sculptural installation that captures the shared histories of the local shopkeepers in the Passage du Prado - one of the few remaining Paris arcades. Through this collaborative process, Kimber aims to weave collective narratives and, as he puts it, “reconfigure the way that we engage with history by listening to local stories, translating them into sculptural forms [to capture] a living sense of place”.

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Mason Kimber - Interview
by Simek Shropshire
Floorr Magazine - Issue 20, London
13th June 2019



Featured in your exhibition Slanted Memories at COMA, Sydney, were a series of sculptural tablets that were reminiscent of Greco-Roman marble sculptures, particularly the ornamental reliefs and frescos that adorn the facades of ancient temples. Alongside the inspiration you gleaned from a trip to Quezon City, Philippines, was there a classical influence in this most recent body of work?

My interest in ancient reliefs and fresco painting stems from my 3-month studio residency at the British School at Rome in 2014, which continues to influence the work I make. My research proposal for that residency was based on the concept of ‘architectural memory’, and Rome is an obvious choice because of its many visible layers of history.

I became obsessed with the broken materiality of frescos and their direct connections to a past era. There are so many examples in Italy where art, design and architecture were integrated into a unifying system. Fresco painting itself is a mixture of painting, sculptural relief and architecture. Regardless of location or era, I’m interested in the history that is stored and embedded within the surfaces of things, and how buildings can hold memories and emotions within their skins.

Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? Where did you study?

I was born in Perth, Western Australia and did my undergraduate studies at Curtin University. After living in New York for a year, I moved to Sydney to do an MFA in painting at the National Art School, where I now work as a casual teacher in the painting department.

Most people in my family are entrepreneurs and self-starters, so I grew up in a supportive environment and was encouraged to follow my passions. Looking back, I realise that my leanings towards art can also be traced back to my grandfathers. The one on my father’s side started painting when he retired and taught me traditional painting techniques as a kid. When I was a teenager, my mum revealed to me that I had another grandfather who was an artist and he was associated with the Neo-Expressionist movement in New York during the late 70’s and early 80’s. I discovered he was also a figurative painter making works about memory, and I ended up visiting him in the Hudson Valley, where he still lives.

Throughout your career, you have exhibited paintings and wall-based reliefs that contain collaged, fragmented elements. Some paintings themselves exist as fragments of a whole, such as the frescoes in your exhibition ‘Oltre la Vista’ in which each painted scene has been partially chipped away from the plaster. What are your intentions behind such elemental fragmentation? How do you conceive of fragmentation in relation to memory and recollection?

The beauty of a fragment is that it never contains a complete story. The viewer is invited to speculate on what’s missing and fill in the gaps themselves. It’s this idea of leaving room for the audience.

When making those fresco works, I realised that by almost destroying the painted image it actually opened things up. What’s left is a feeling for something that was once there, a residue of previous gestures and hints of the past. A fragment of something can speak much louder than the whole. The key is to find that sweet spot where just enough visual information is given without revealing the entire story.

I see memory as fragmentary by nature. There are details of my childhood house that appear vivid, such as the concrete floors and blue metal wardrobes, while other aspects of it remain obscured. This speaks to the way that images are recalled in the mind; it’s necessary to focus on some details and forget others. Images of past memories can remain scattered unless they’re given a location or room. It’s said that doorways can destroy memory, so the moment you pass through an architectural threshold, a signal is sent to the mind that a new scene has begun, and that it’s time to refresh. I’d like to think that my wall tablets serve as new homes for lost memories.


Stone/Cloud, 2019

You have stated, “My intention is not to recreate the physical exactness of a space or object,’ Kimber says, ‘it’s about capturing their memories and tangible qualities, and turning them into monuments to stories that are worth preserving.” Would you classify your paintings, reliefs, and installations as mnemonic artefacts? If so, what does it mean for these works to serve as archives of memories that may not be your own?

Mnemonic artefacts - that’s a great way to describe them! Memory is never factually accurate or wholly authentic. Instead, I think of memories as subjective fragments from the past that are constantly being re-invented or shaped by our own present circumstances. Because memories are rearranged in the mind, they can offer clues.

The surface moulds I cast are not just a straightforward copy of a place, instead they embrace the uncertainty of remembering. Through an intuitive studio process of breaking, marking, shaping and painting, I am able to insert my own visual language into the narrative of the original object. The work becomes a capsule of the past and present, an intermingling of personal and collective stories. Perhaps they could be thought of as shared archives of remembering?

Tell us a bit about how you spend your day / studio routine? What is your studio like?

I recently moved into Shirlow Street Studios, a new studio complex  run by Art Incubator, a philanthropic program for Sydney artists. I have several casual jobs within the arts that sometimes take up my mornings, however most afternoons and evenings are dedicated to studio time.

My studio is divided into two rough zones: one for painting and the other for sculptural stuff, such as mould-making and casting. In recent years, the floor has become more important than the walls. I try to apply an archeological approach to painting, mining the remnants of objects and orphaned fragments scattered throughout the floor for potential future uses. Each contain their own layered histories and may go through years of iterations and identities before finding their final form or location. I like to keep this element of discovery, which is partly why I continuously break and remake fragments. It’s almost as if I’m searching for something that was always there, yet difficult to notice. They just needs to be mined and excavated to reveal their hidden potential.

The best thing about a studio-based practice is that you can think through making.

I prefer responding to things rather than importing my conclusions onto them. I think part of my roles as an artist is to empathise with these stranded objects and give them a new sense of belonging.

What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?

I recently came across an exhibition online by Cayetano Ferrer titled ‘Memory Screen’ at Commonwealth and Council in LA. Ferrer casts remnant components of old buildings and uses them to layer and frame the gallery space in multiple ways. There’s many examples of artists that make casts of historical objects, however Ferrer’s work seems to emphasise and celebrate the fissures, slippages and breakages that distinguish the replica from the original. Combining fragments of LA’s historic architecture such as stained glass windows and archways from across periods, his incomplete, hybrid forms invite you to fill the gaps of what’s missing. These gaps also speak to the film sets of Hollywood, where scenic backdrops, replicas and CGI technology constantly blur the line between reality and imitation.

Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?

I’m most excited about a site-specific project in Paris’ north-eastern arrondissements called PROLOGUE I, held in conjunction with Galerie Allen, Untilthen, and KADIST Foundation, in November 2019.

I’m planning to make moulds and fragments of objects and surfaces that reconfigure the way that we engage with history by listening to local stories and translating them into sculptural forms. Although it’s impossible to faithfully represent someone else’s story,  I’m hoping to rediscover traces of the past that have been overlooked. So many dusty narratives remain hidden beneath the surfaces of our built environment. What if they can be animated so that history becomes alive again?

Right now I'm experimenting with a new series of works for a solo show opening in September at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne.

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Mason Kimber: Slanted Mansions
by Emma O’Neill
The Urban List, Sydney
October 2018

Raised in an architectural feature home in Perth that was all straight lines, simple shapes and a blurred interior/exterior, Mason Kimber’s work has long been informed by the construction of homes and memories. In his latest suite of works the artist takes his cue from the far messier, tumbledown buildings of Manila in Quezon City, Philippines. The mega-city, twice as densely populated as NYC, has been stamped by Spanish Conquest, shaken by frequent earthquakes, ripened and burst open by never-ending urbanization.

Mason wraps this patchwork of shared space into quiet, cool-coloured sculptural tablets. Appearing like soft-focus surveillance images, the paintings/sculptures cut through the clean lines of COMA Gallery in Rushcutters Bay and are far more interesting than your average holiday souvenir. Thanks for the memories, Mason.

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Slanted Mansions
by Mariam Arcilla
Catalogue text, COMA, Sydney
September 2018

In Slanted Mansions, Mason Kimber presents a new inventory of sculptural tablets, floating fragments, and compositional sketches that preserve the decaying chapters of places and memories in Manila. The story starts in June of this year. Kimber and I visited my hometown of Quezon City, in the ripe howls of monsoon season. Mummified into raincoats, we explored my childhood home, former school, and my uncle’s marble factory—poignant sites that shaped my family’s lives and today continue to decline from the decades-old sway of time, weather, and neglect. Kimber listened to my stories of growing up in this vivacious megacity, which exists within a climate cocktail of earthquakes, super-typhoons, landslides, and volcanic eruptions.

These natural disasters left neighbourhoods in a hotchpotch—slanted homes, tangled gardens, and rubbled walkways. My family reset ourselves many times: we’d replace soaked beds, repair roofs, salvage floating debris, and wash out lava ash from our clothes. Eventually, we learnt to become limber to the dance moves of this ever-shaking metropolis. We painted our homes in cornflower blue and peppermint—colours that behaved as pulsating way-finders during acid rain and electrical brownouts. We erected steel gates to keep floods out. We staked walled perimeters with thorny fields of smashed soft-drink bottles to deter wind-hurled structures, as well as looters. It was here that I developed pre-mourned gratitude for possessions, knowing there was a chance they’d break or float out the door in the next wet season.

In Tagalog, the phrase ‘sumaging lagi sa alaala’ has dual meaning: ‘to haunt a memory’ and to ‘keep a memory.’ It’s similar to this mixed feeling of letting go of an object in your mind mentally, while still being able to touch it physically; a reverse phantom-limb of sorts. The jumbling of memory is a main propeller for Kimber. Before he was a full-time artist, he collected vinyl and hosted radio shows as a music producer in Perth. He spent days hunting down rare, yesteryear vinyl and chopping them up to reconfigure into new sounds.

Today, as a visual artist, he remains faithful to this method, splicing memories and weaving them into new compositions—often while listening to the same songs in the studio.  Esteemed music producer Mark Ronson summed it up elegantly: ‘Sampling isn't about hijacking nostalgia wholesale. It's about inserting yourself into the narrative of a song while also pushing that story forward.' In Slanted Mansions, Kimber recorded his personal observations and shared experiences of Manila, and remixed them into a new authorship that paid ode to the legacies of keeping and haunting a memory.

While in Manila, Kimber entombed mnemonic surfaces with sticky coats of amethyst-purple silicon moulds: structural shapes like gates, roofs, windows, and balcony walls, and portable items, such as plants, carved furniture, and heirlooms. Once hardened to rubber, these moulds were peeled off, like escape pods detached from their source, to unearth replicas of fissures and mounds. The shapes are then remastered with gypsum and resin to form odd-edged slab pillows that emanate off walls and clustered fragments that lash around like steep glaciers or bulbous stalagmites; one reminds me of a chocolate bar broken up to share. These works are by no means intricate copies. Rather, they triumph the intuitive and abstract marks of a studio process — sunken edges, rasped patterns, and goosebumped imprints—in the same way that memory fogs and fades through time. ‘My intention is not to recreate the physical exactness of a space or object,’ Kimber says, ‘it’s about capturing their memories and tangible qualities, and turning them into monuments to stories that are worth preserving.

Mason Kimber - Slanted Mansions from COMA on Vimeo.

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Future Relics
by Mariam Arcilla
Catalogue text, Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne
May 2018

Even the most elastic of superbeings, time travellers, have rules to obey. This license to vanish out of rooms and bounce into new eras is restricted by a simple quantum catch: their bodies can move through space and time, but their  surrounding architecture must stay behind, in a previous timeline.

How then does one capture the memory of a place, the grasp of it? How can the fragments of a room, a pathway, a building, or a view be smuggled into new memories?

Mason Kimber is anchored by the inbetweenness of architecture and memory: places that serve as timestamps, surfaces that form sentiment, colours that trigger. Born and raised in Perth, the artist moved home several times (as children of divorce often do), before decamping to Sydney a decade ago, where the erratic city rental climate had him hopping studios every year. Kimber has since developed a painting practice that deals with the collision of experienced places — interiors and exteriors that have become sanctuaries for the artist.

For Future Relics, Kimber mines his Bondi studio environment for artifacts, creating impressions from ornamental motifs, limestone columns, bubbled windows, and pavement patterns. They are cast into moulds, along with personal effects like paint palettes, ceramic mugs, plastic particles, and fauna. He then breaks and remixes the pieces with cast archives from past studios. Assembled excavation-style on the ground, they are enshrined as islands of form and texture, through the process of pouring, marking, and setting.

What arises is a new dialect of relics. Bordered, shallow-pooled slabs that rupture, swell, and splinter like maps of a re-envisioned city or a memory puzzle that minces before with now. Presented as wall-based panels, they clasp you into gaze with their skatey gestures, boney curves, and chromatic grouping; they allude to Kimber’s surrounding architecture of historic buildings and the sea. Through his practice, Kimber has found a way, perhaps a loophole, to stamp time and collect a place.

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Why you need to see...Mason Kimber
by Katie Milton
The Sydney Morning Herald
17th March 2017

As a teenager, Mason Kimber lived in an architectural feature house in Perth. The first residential project by Patroni Architects, Kimber House was immaculate, a concept realised in clean angles, geometric shapes and interior elements that extended as features on the outside of the house. The boundary between the inside and the outside was intentionally blurred.

"This had a big effect on the way I think about space and all the paintings I do. I've realised they're about that threshold – in and out," Kimber says.

After completing his master of fine art (painting) at National Art School in Sydney, Kimber was awarded a residency at the British School in Rome, where his work became entangled with frescoes, an antique painting technique on wet lime plaster.

"It takes seven or eight hours to dry and in that time you can paint into it, and when it dries the painting becomes the wall," he says.

This year, he scored a coveted one-year studio residency with Artspace, and now paints from a spacious third-floor space overlooking Sydney Harbour. Working with an iPad propped on a wall mount next to his canvas, Kimber moves back and forth between the digital and the physical.

"I take a photo of the canvas and put it in Photoshop and collage different sources into the image, then go back and paint it onto the canvas," he says.

Kimber's solo exhibition, Arcades, is his first in two years. The name comes from the Arcades Project, an unfinished collection of writing by German literary critic Walter Benjamin. "They're fragments," says Kimber of his collaged paintings, comprised of samples of smaller paintings, photographs, cheap fabrics, architectural sketches and Roman ruins and motifs. Evolving from his earlier frescoes, now he's excavating an archaeology of his own past works.

"I'm interested in architecture and different shapes, and the way different surfaces and textures can make you feel," Kimber says.

PAINTINGS OF PAINTINGS
by Stella Rosa McDonald
Catalogue text, Arcades, Galerie pompom, Sydney
March 2017

In the Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes of the effects of snow upon a house;

The house derives reserves and refinements of intimacy from winter; while in the outside world, snow covers all tracks, blurs the road, muffles every sound, conceals all colors. As a result of this universal whiteness, we feel a form of cosmic negation in action. The dreamer of houses knows and senses this, and because of the diminished entity of the outside world, experiences all the qualities of intimacy with increased intensity.

Bachelard writes of the Winter House in negative, revealing the psychic state of interior space from the outside in. The walls, doors, apertures and corners of the house are thrown into relief by seasonal warmth, cold, closeness and distance. For the dreamer of houses, the foundations are always built upon a semantic equation. We are, as Bachelard so deftly lays out, where we are not.

Mason is on the floor of his studio, casually shuffling through soft piles of hand-drawn sketches as if they are receipts, or quotes (albeit his own). He appears to be looking for—and finding—nothing in particular. He talks while he touches the paper. His process is to flicker—a jarring term he often uses to describe both the quality he is seeking to bring out in the paintings and the way he goes about bringing it—between the material and mannered spaces of architecture, the screen and painting. He wants the final images to flicker too. From the piles of paper quotations, he makes digital collages that form the basis of larger works on canvas, painted in acrylic and collaged with scraps of cheap synthetic fabric sourced from second-hand stores and torn and cut sections of his own painted canvases. He gleans from his own crops.

Kurt Schwitters saw collage as a shortcut between intuition and the artwork. William Burroughs used the cut-up to short circuit language. Freud sorted through our bins, looking for scraps to help us understand ourselves. Virginia Woolf made use of whatever fragments came her way. The connections between hitherto unconnected things, via the accumulation and arrangement of scraps, is what collage—bald and basic—so acutely achieves. In the context of Mason’s work, slicing, splicing, compression and omission are processes that circumvent perception and certainly refer toward the image’s own precariousness and decay.

Each painting is embryonic in the sense that it holds the key to its own potential. Each painting is historical in the sense that it is made from a collection of past parts. By being both the same as and different from versions of themselves in time, these paintings enter a third state—one of alterity—with each being defined by something other than ‘the sameness of the imitative as compared to the original’.

Patterns, lines and relationships are scaled. A section of this one is swapped out for the architectural motif of that. A brick-skin grid from here is forced into a neat companionship with a blue isosceles triangle from over there. A balustrade is just as likely to be made from steel as it is from chalk. The slippages between works make the passage of elisions and ellipses nearly impossible to trace. And these slippages, along with an understanding of Mason’s strategic use of the screen as an aid for process, could inevitably lead to a characterisation of his painting as a type of tab surfing, where information is arrived at through potentially endless hypertextual association. Such a restless search is prone to conspiracy, association and proof as coincidence (Wonderful!), but the budding and burgeoning Rhizome is not Mason’s project. His vernacular glance—directed toward the screen as much as is toward the interior of a book or a room—is not circumscribed by the tabulated screen, but by the colour of his thought.

These works make little distinction between the acts of painting and thinking. They are paintings of paintings. And I am so moved by the insularity of that pursuit.

What's the Angle, Mason Kimber?
by Sophie Lanigan
19th March 2017


My interest in architecture is tickled with fancy at the structure of Mason Kimber's paintings, particularly my favourite from his current exhibition, Arcades at Galerie Pompom, Pathway/Patina.

In Pathway/Patina, Kimber has found a way around the inadequacy of paint to create tangible depth by stretching the canvas with semi-translucent layers of the same coloured deep blue fabric. It has a similarly compelling nature to the pigment works of Yves Klein, where you simply fall into the blueness. With a white oil stick he has given us the gentlest of directions towards a vanishing point somewhere on the right, so instead of falling into an abyss, we fall into the painting. At the edge, a pastiche of textural fragments have been cut and collaged to frame the picture - this is the threshold we cross to step inside. Similar to his frescoes there is a slowness about the process of this painting because each fragment glued to the fabric is made at various, potentially unrelated, points in time, so the painting starts not knowing what it is going to be until Kimber corrals it together. Like different architectural details chosen over time and finally appearing all in the same space.


Historically this work has a nearer reach than his preceding suite of frescos. Instead of evidence of renaissance masters, which reared their influential heads when Kimber took residence at the British School at Rome, the architectural theories of Gaston Bachelard and collage techniques of Kurt Schwitters come to the fore. These are refined works; they are clever in their apparent confusion and striking in their technical and logical merit. Mason is a painter’s painter - he’s got a thorough idea, a confident mark and an engaging composition. In her exhibition essay Stella Rose McDonald astutely points out that Kimber is making ‘Paintings of Paintings’. Painterly angles lead us to the point that Kimber is thinking about Painting, and painting about thinking, which is a very good angle to have if you're a painting painter. Paint

When I first saw the paintings of Mason Kimber, I was assailed by images from a film I had seen decades prior and long forgotten. The plot of The Belly of and Architect eluded me at the time – my memory was like a film reel that had been chopped and thrown up in the air; a potent series of screenshots juxtaposing Roman statues, elaborate interiors, Grecian columns and rolls of architectural drawings. The bodies in these images were fixed and mute, subsumed by the spaces within which they posed. It is a film by Peter Greenaway, who is often described as making films like paintings, and beloved by architects for his preoccupation with creative genius. Amongst the ruins of my memory, the film remains as a kind of cinematic collision between architecture and art.

Ruins are fragments; they suggest past and future wholes. In the same way, Kimber’s paintings are fragmentary both in material form and compositional strategy. They hold literal ruins as well as metaphorical ones, with recurring motifs from ancient Rome that serve as semiotic stand-ins for the past. In NEW16, she shows larger works on canvas as well as the smaller frescos on board that he has become known for. Each painting maps Kimber’s own history: classical busts from his residency at the British School at Rome, architectural elements from a childhood home, and cinematic memories from his past works. The surfaces of these paintings hold the ruins of past ideas, as well as the suggestion of future ones. At times opaque shapes collide with one another, only for one to slip between the others as if underwater. Pastels scrape the skin of oil paint, and watercolours conceal and reveal past images. The frescos themselves are in a state of ruin – a struggle between paint and the texture of sand and plaster. These shattered surfaces are suggestive of forms, spaces and figures, but refuse direct narration.

Tactile yet seemingly fragile, Mason Kimber’s frescos for his first solo show at Sydney’s Galerie pompom provoke contradictory responses: to touch, at the risk of adding to the apparent erosion, but also to protect what is left.

Oltre la Vista – or “beyond the view” – is a poignant play on the slipperiness of memory, feeling and meaning, and Kimber’s daring use of materials and ideas in the frescos in particular succeed by evoking some unnamed nostalgia – not as sentiment but as the pain of an old wound and a lost world.

Six of the 13 works here are an alchemy of pigment on sand and high-calcium lime plaster, the chemical reaction leaving a grainy surface. It seems as though the works have been excavated from a Roman ruin. The plaster forms a ragged, sandy frame closing around abstract images of angular window frames, looking onto distant aqua sea or perhaps sky.

Kimber paints fresh onto the plaster, just before it completely dries, so that the art and its architecture are one. “Fresco is known as one of the hardest mediums to work with,” he says, “but I think the unique effects it produces are worth the effort.”

The artist’s play with our perception was born of an interest in spatial perspective and illusion, stemming from a three-month artist’s studio residency at the British School at Rome. The recurring aqua motif though appears homegrown: he grew up in Cottesloe, Perth, between the Swan River and the Indian Ocean.

The other seven works are oil on canvas. Visually, it’s a contradictory shock, having spent time studying the frescos, to then look at the largest of the oil works, Thinking Slow, Painting Fast, 2015, with its much bolder green background and fragment of a male torso. It’s dominant and demanding of your attention, compared to the frescos’ suggestion of fading light and life.