English: Art - Pottery

Publicity Caption Mrs. Helen Mason taking some pottery from her kiln, which is fired using diesel oil. Mrs. Mason and four friends built the kiln themselves.

Photographer Mr. Nicholson

July 1965.

Archives New Zealand Reference: AAQT 6539 W3537 60 / A77535 www.archway.archives.govt.nz/ViewFullItem.do?code=24460155

Helen Mason was a New Zealand potter born in Darfield in 1915. Mason took up pottery in 1953, attending classes and buying a diesel kiln from her husband's aunt, Elizabeth Matheson. Over the next few years she met and worked with other New Zealand artists including potters Olive Jones, Barry Brickell, Len Castle and Doreen Blumhardt, and painter Colin McCahon, and by 1957 had exhibited and sold her first pot. In 1958, she and Blumhardt co-founded New Zealand Potter magazine, which Mason edited for nine years.

In the 1960s she moved to the Waitakere Ranges, then Otane in Hawke's Bay and, in 1974, Tokomaru Bay. It was there that she was involved with establishing the Tauira Craft Centre. In the 2005 New Year Honours she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to pottery. She died on August 22 2014, aged 99.

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Material from Archives New Zealand Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga