Cynthia Mason is a visual artist whose soft paintings and mixed media wall constructions simultaneously evoke the beautiful and the grotesque. Viewers may feel compelled to pinch and poke them to see how they will respond. Are we drawn in because the works are alluring, or is it because they are monstrous? While the works on view vary in scale and material, they speak to the specific interests of the artist, including the use of grids, the recurrence of forms that allude to the natural world and a fascination with experimental textures and materials.

Mason’s training in architecture led to her interest in representing grids in her work. While grids are typically used to define and control space, Mason’s soft, unstructured sculptural grids allow us to question what happens when this rigid control is quite literally loosened. Mason’s wall constructions also allude to forms found in plant life: roots, stems, leaves and thorns, sometimes winkingly inviting comparisons to the human body. For example, are the “pricks” in Limp Pricks and Plants in Rising Water truly referring to thorns, or are they slyly alluding to human anatomy?

Mason creates compelling textures in her works through creative combinations of materials, including such unconventional media as shredded documents, recycled bedding and fishing line, as well as more traditional artist materials of canvas, porcelain, gesso, ink, fabric and dyes. She states: “My sculptural paintings expand dimensionally, as my love for materials results in folding, rolling, attaching, and stuffing porcelain, plaster, fabrics, shredded paper, and other mediums in haphazard or makeshift methods. I love to reveal how materials repel or merge, ooze and crack, how they patina and shift to show their existence.”

About the Artist

Cynthia Mason’s artistic practice is based in St. Petersburg, Florida. She received her BFA from Ringling College of Art and received her MFA from the University of South Florida. In addition to a recent residency with the Jentel Artists Residency Program (2024), she has completed residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts (2023) and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (2023). Her work has been featured in over 50 group exhibitions around the world; recent solo exhibitions include Limp Grid at Parallelogram Gallery, Tampa (2018), and Fragile State at 621 Gallery, Tallahassee (2017). In 2019, she was a recipient of the Creative Pinellas Professional Artist Grant.

Florida Contemporary 2024-25
The Baker Museum