Mount Maunganui-based potter Laurie Steer demonstrates his ability to connect ancient pottery traditions with fantastical forms that exist in the sphere between fine arts and crafts.

13 March to 18 June, Tauranga Art Gallery Toi Tauranga

Based in Mount Maunganui, contemporary artist Laurie Steer specialises in unique wood-fired ceramics. Initially trained in sculpture, Steer’s fascination with pottery led him to work under renowned late-ceramicist Barry Brickell for several years from Brickell’s base at Driving Creek Railway and Potteries, Coromandel.

He credits the eminent potter with enabling him to ‘un-learn’ certain conceptual restrictions gleaned from the art school environment, leading Steer to embrace irreverent and ever-expanding approaches to forming objects from the earth, all of which exist both inside and outside of the gallery environment.

Displaying over 100 newly fired ceramics, Steer’s new installation The Abundance of Water has been specially conceived for Tauranga Art Gallery. Described as a ‘dinner table from hell’, Steer uses the framework of a banquet dinner setting as a springboard to explore ideas of consumption and excess through a range of both menacing and animated objects, each covered in odd bulges, knobs and spikes.