The artist Charles Mason, who has taken his own life aged 50, created a remarkable body of work. His knowledge of shape and his appreciation of an unlikely surface recalled both Alberto Giacometti and Constantin Brancusi.
Charles was born in Exeter and grew up in Cambridge, where his parents, Harold and Eve, were both academics. Understanding and interpreting the world through making objects was central to his life from an early age.
He studied for his BA in fine art at the University of the West of England in Bristol and then did an MA in sculpture at the Slade in London from 1987 to 1989. On graduating he set about developing a highly distinctive studio practice and regularly exhibited throughout Europe and the UK, including group exhibitions such as Physical Evidence at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, Thinking Aloud at Camden Arts Centre and Manufacture at the Kunsthaus, CentrePasquArt, in Switzerland
I first met Charles after his return from a year-long scholarship at the British School at Rome in 1997, when I invited him to exhibit in Thinking Aloud at Camden Arts Centre. There was something altogether European about Charles's endeavour (he had a Swiss mother) and his work was particularly well received in France. I always loved talking to him about architecture, and those semi-obdurate surfaces which the French and Iberians celebrate.
I think he was resisting something in the cultural air of England. He enjoyed the gaps in translation that he encountered when exhibiting abroad, which often provided him with new ways of thinking about his work and art generally. His titles repeatedly played with double or triple meanings. Form-making and the workmanlike control of surface and volume is rarely discussed nowadays, but Charles could show you "how it was done" and jolt the spectator. The "give" in material was always a central ploy in his work, his curvatures hard and soft, brittle and friable.
Charles respected the idea of the studio as lair. He was extraordinarily resourceful in manhandling works in and out of his airy basement studio in London via ingeniously converted stairs and doorways. He was a generous and inspiring tutor at several art colleges, including the Ruskin School in Oxford and Wimbledon School of Art. He will be profoundly missed by everyone who knew him.
He is survived by his wife, Naomi Wilkinson, whom he married in 1991.