Helen Mason

Helen Wilmot Mason (née Valentine; 30 April 1915 – 22 August 2014) was a New Zealand potter as well as the co-founder and editor of the New Zealand Potter magazine for which she also wrote. She was appointed to the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to pottery, in 2005.

Biography Born in Darfield in 1915, Mason grew up in Wellington. In 1938 her engagement to Malcolm John Mason was announced, and the couple married the following year. A stoneware experimentalist, she had by 1964 exhibited in Australia, Japan and Washington.

The early 1960s saw Mason become a full-time potter, and she abandoned her home and marriage, moving to the Waitākere Ranges, then Ōtāne in Hawke's Bay and, in 1974, Tokomaru Bay. It was there that she was involved with establishing the Tauira Craft Centre with Ngoi Pēwhairangi. Works by Mason are held in the permanent collection of the Dowse Art Museum.

Described as an influential figure in New Zealand crafts and ceramics at the forefront of the emerging New Zealand pottery movement in the 1950s, Mason exhibited widely in New Zealand and internationally. As well as editing The New Zealand Potter, Mason contributed to the New Zealand Listener Waima of Tokomaru Bay (1984) and Commitment to clay (2008). She featured in an episode of the television arts show The Big Art Trip in 2002. In 2005, she published her memoir, entitled Helen Mason's scrapbook: 50 years as a backyard potter.