THE New School House Gallery in York is marking the 70th birthday of British steel and bronze sculptor Michael Lyons by mounting his “first significant solo show” since 2009.

That year Lyons exhibited First Light: China Morning at the Royal British Society of Sculptors in London. This summer, his first ever York exhibition features a new body of work inspired by ideas surrounding the Roman cult of Mithras.

Michael Lyons: The Mithras Suite coincides with the relocation of the London Mithras temple, discovered in Walbrook Square in 1954, to its original position within Bloomberg LP’s new European headquarters in the capital.

“Robert Teed and Paula Jackson [the gallery directors] asked me to exhibit at the New School House and I was kind of thinking about doing something that related to York with all its layers of history and Roman past,” says Michael.

“Initially I was going to make a lot of intuitive sculptures, but then the gallery secured the loan of two Mithraic sculptures from York Museums Trust, and so now my sculptures are highly intuitive but also refer to the myth.”

Should you be wondering about that myth, the worship of Mithras was a secret cult popular among soldiers of the Roman Empire, who were said to be attracted by its emphasis on truth, loyalty and justice and promise of personal salvation. By the 2nd century AD, the Mithras cult had spread as far west as Britain, and the two ancient Mithraic carvings being exhibited at the New School House were both found in York.

Michael’s exhibition combines sculptures with drawings and etchings and the past with the present. “In a sense they’re modern sculptures. It’s not a historical exhibition,” he emphasises. “The Mithraic history in York is there but I’ve made it immediate. I hope I’ve given it a sense of modernity, using the myth as a way to look at the present.”

Michael’s past work has drawn on aspects of nature, cosmology, myth and ancient cultures, and his latest pieces build on a “storehouse of images, feelings, reverie and recollection”. “The sources come from deep within myself and what has been inwardly digested at a psychological level,” he says.

In practical terms, over the past two years at his studio at Cawood, near Selby, Michael has weaved elements of myth into sculptures that use found objects that range from former tools to the coiled spring of a much-loved Mercedes Benz.

After a career spanning more than 30 years, exhibiting in Britain, China, Mexico, Argentina and Australia, undertaking residencies in Canada, Germany, the United States, Turkey and Cyprus, and teaching and making sculpture in Hangzhou, Beijing and Shanghai, Michael is now featuring in three Yorkshire shows at once in July and August.

Creating a “Yorkshire sculpture triangle”, he is exhibiting not only in York but also at 108 Fine Art, in Cold Bath Road, Harrogate, where he is showing a retrospective of Sculpture and Works on Paper from the 1960s to 2000, and at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, near Wakefield, where his show is entitled Artist Rocks: Echo And Revelation.

“That exhibition is small but, as I like to say, beautifully formed,” says Michael. “There are only eight pieces in it, and it’s much more organic than the work I have here in York. It’s about movement and landscape and also comes from my travels in China, where I’ve come across mountainous places that are represented in Chinese art with intimations of infinity.” The trio of exhibitions also ties in with the publication of the first major study of the Bilston-born sculptor’s work, The Sculpture Of Michael Lyons by Dr Judith LeGrove.

“I was very keen to do all these shows because I wanted to celebrate that I’d survived a serious illness in 2010 and to celebrate the work that I’ve done,” says Michael, who turned 70 on July 10.

“You know you’ve done more years than you’re going to get, but though the sheer act of getting older may slow you down, it doesn’t slow down your creativity.

“I don’t feel I’m 70 – though sometimes I do physically, but I don’t feel different creatively and I have enough ideas to keep going. It’s wonderful to have the talent to do so because you’re never bored, even if you can get downhearted, but never deeply so.”