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.
Though ceramics remain at the core of his practice, Rayner has also explored other media, including photography and latch hook works. These parallel threads share the same irreverent sensibility, using unexpected crafting materials and juxtapositions to challenge conventions around taste, value, and tradition.
Born in Luton, England, Rayner emigrated to New Zealand with his family in the 1970’s. He returned to the UK in his 20’s, living there for 15 years before returning to New Zealand and commencing his creative practice. He is now based in Whanganui, where he co-founded Rayner Brothers Gallery in 2007 alongside his brother Paul. He exhibits widely across Aotearoa, with works held in numerous private collections.
Mark Rayner has been represented by Parnell Gallery since 2025.