Ben Mazey makes sculptures of familiar household objects that have quietly gone wrong, and the wrongness is the point. Domestic forms stretched, halved, glazed like masks, or cast in bronze sit somewhere between a cartoon world and a genuine reckoning with identity, nostalgia, and the objects we surround ourselves with without quite noticing why.
Working primarily in slab-built ceramic, often starting with a fixed rectangle of clay contorted through simple mathematical rules, Mazey layers glaze with a lo-fi palette that favours the unresolved. Some pieces are half-gold, half-raw. Others carry the impermanence of Land Art within what is, on the surface, a domestic still life. He occasionally works in lost wax bronze casting, with a 2026 residency at Fonderia Battaglia in Milan extending this strand of his practice.
Born in New Zealand in 1980, Mazey spent seven years as Design Director at Kenzo in Paris before returning to Australia at the onset of the pandemic and beginning ceramic work in a nearly empty apartment. He has held solos at C. Gallery, Melbourne Design Fair, and Melbourne Art Fair, and placed as a finalist in the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize in 2023 and 2024.
