Meet Mere Mason

We recently connected with Mere Mason and have shared our conversation below.

Mere, thank you so much for taking the time to share your lessons learned with us and we’re sure your wisdom will help many. So, one question that comes up often and that we’re hoping you can shed some light on is keeping creativity alive over long stretches – how do you keep your creativity alive?

For me personally, creativity isn’t optional. I have really bad ADHD, and tasks that don’t interest me feel literally impossible to follow through on. My brain just will not do it. So I’ve had to get creative about being creative. I trick myself into attaching some kind of creative angle to almost everything I need to do, because that’s the only way I can actually function. It’s a coping mechanism that happens to also be my life’s work. I can’t let it die because I would never get anything done!

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

I grew up in Pittsburgh and moved to Florida about 25 years ago, which still somehow surprises me when I say it out loud. For most of my adult life I worked as a massage therapist and a singer-songwriter, two things that have nothing obviously in common except that they both went away completely when Covid hit. I couldn’t touch people and I couldn’t play shows, and I had to figure out what to do with myself.
I had always made visual art, just never as a business. That changed fast.
I live in Springfield with my husband Alex and our 2 kids, and have a studio in Riverside at Margaret Street Studios, and what I do there is hard to put in a single category. I make colorful, bold sculptures and functional art like lighting and vases. I work with paper pulp and glue to create a paper clay blend that dries incredibly solid and sturdy, which lets me do something I love maybe more than anything else: I rescue materials that are on their way to a landfill and turn them into something permanent. Styrofoam, packing materials, things people throw away without thinking twice. I coat them in my blend, build them up, and they become something completely different. I call it art-cycling.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

I try to never get stuck in my ways, I’m always learning and deep diving. I want to know all of my options with materials and all of the ways to execute a design. If I meet someone who paves roads, I’m asking them questions on the materials they use, and the process from start to finish because I could use that knowledge in my own work. That curiosity has opened more doors for me than any formal training ever could. My advice is to always follow the threads. Learn skills adjacent to your art because everything end up connecting somewhere down the road. .The information is out there and most of it is free.

The second is flexibility, and I mean that both literally and creatively. Sculpture taught me this. Sometimes a piece starts going in a direction i did not plan for, and the worst thing I can do is fight it. The best work I have made came from letting the piece be what it wanted to be and trusting that. Imperfection is not failure. It is usually just the piece telling me something. Learning to listen to that instead of resist it changed everything for me.

The third is that I am outgoing, so I talk to people. I show up. I say yes. A surprising number of good opportunities have come to me simply because I was in the room and not afraid to be there and share my ideas.

My advice to anyone starting out: be exploratory, be flexible, and stay open. Art is how we cope, how we process, how we bring joy to other people and to ourselves. It is how we disrupt. Never lose sight of that, because that is the whole point!

Who has been most helpful in helping you overcome challenges or build and develop the essential skills, qualities or knowledge you needed to be successful?

One of my best friends Virgil has taught me so much about craftsmanship and process. He spent his entire life as a contractor restoring old houses in San Francisco and Oakland. He retired and moved to Florida and I’m lucky to live next door to him. He is a wealth of knowledge, especially on installation and materials. He knows everything and will sometimes help me with bigger installations. He’s an artist too but he doesn’t realize it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://Meremason.com
• Instagram: Art_of_mere