We are delighted to welcome ceramicist Mark Rayner to Parnell Gallery’s roster of represented artists.

Based in Whanganui, Rayner’s ceramic practice embraces the curious and the irresistibly strange.

Since beginning in ceramics in 2003, Rayner has developed a distinct body of work that revels in subversion and satire. His glazed figurines combine craft with caricature, presenting a world where the excessive, the absurd, and the darkly humorous collide. Rayner’s aesthetic is deliberately skewed; a place where traditional forms are pushed into new, often unsettling territory. Drawing on a lineage of the grotesque, his works exaggerate, distort, and playfully provoke. Figures leer and grin, plates become stages for bizarre dramas, and nothing is as innocent as it first appears. These objects offer a strange allure: charming, grotesque, and uncomfortably familiar.

Rayner engages with politics, popular culture, and collective nostalgia through his ceramics, creating satirical and seductive works. While humour is ever-present, it is rarely without bite. His characters and creatures often seem to reflect something of ourselves to us; skewed, magnified, or wonderfully warped. There is a tension at the heart of Rayner’s practice, between the decorative and the disturbing, the comical and the critical. His ceramics invite response, reaction, and sometimes confrontation; they are unapologetically strange, addictive to collect, and impossible to ignore.

Head to our website to view available works by Mark Rayner here, and contact the gallery with enquiries on art@parnellgallery.co.nz