Paul MOUNT

PAUL MOUNT British, 1922-2009

Paul Mount was born Devon, where he attended Paignton School of Art. He went to London where he studied at the Royal College of Art until he was called up for war service in 1941. He served in the Friends Ambulance Unit in North Africa and then France where he had his first, formative encounter with Romanesque sculpture. Paul Mount married Jeanne Martin, a fellow RCA student in Paris in 1946. Returning to the Royal College of Art, London, he painted portraits and urban landscapes. From 1948 he taught at Winchester School of Art.

In 1955 he took a job in Lagos, Nigeria, setting up an art department at Yaba technical institute. Starting with just an empty building, he designed the furniture and equipment, and recruited students. His work at Yaba - one of the achievements of which he was proudest - led to two contacts that shaped his career. To ensure students learned marketable skills, he employed a wood-carver from Benin. Before long he was experimenting with sculpture - smooth, standing forms in iroko or ebony, reminiscent of Barbara Hepworth. His furniture designs, meanwhile, resulted in commissions from an architectural practice. By 1960 Paul Mount was producing large-scale architectural works, such as his screen wall at the Swiss embassy in Lagos.

The need to create surfaces that deflected the heat while allowing air to circulate - the opposite of modern western architecture's love of glass and light - helped to form Paul Mount's sculptural idiom. His cast-iron and bronze works often seemed to project a robust shield around their airy, inner spaces. Another possible African legacy was his refusal to waste anything. Many of his works in metal were fabricated from waste from previous sculptures.

In 1962 Mount returned to England, settling at Nancherrow, near St Just-in-Penwith, Cornwall, where he was to spend the rest of his life. Paul Mount conceived his sculpture in relation to the landscape, in which it is often sited and probably best viewed. His fascination with machinery, however, led him to develop more angular, industrial forms than other Cornish modernists, closer to those of the Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida, whom he met in France in the 1970s.

In 1965 Paul Mount held his first London shows at Drian Gallery and in 1975 he had a solo exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art. In 1976 he and Jeanne divorced and Mount married the painter June Miles. In 1998 the couple had a joint exhibition at the Penwith Society of Arts in St Ives.