The defining moment in my practice came one morning when I was having a break from casting water purifier urns and I came across Richard Long's "Waterfall Line" in Google.
The work was commissioned by Tate Modern for its year 2000 opening and it is a very large wall mural made from china clay.
The mural intrigued me and I needed to get some idea of the real piece so I flung clay slip onto my office wall and spontaneously made an abstract clay work by drawing and palm painting into the clay surface.
My initial response to the result was lukewarm, but as the clay began to dry the real magic of form and textures began to emerge.
Clay paintings would become a truly original source from which I could create digital photo collages. Since 2014 I have created hundreds of ephemeral clay works which I have photographed in high definition.
My current artworks are all composed from fragment selections from photographs of these clay paintings.
I feel that visually my work is more like fine art painting than a photograph. Photoshop plays a crucial part in the formation of my digital photomontages.
I have a large format pigment ink printer without which the development of my work could not have been possible.
My pigment ink prints are on archival Hahnemuhle paper and canvas.
Lauri Tuominen is a Finnish-born Australian artist whose practice has evolved from studio ceramics and functional pottery to distinctive clay paintings and digital photographic photomontages.
Born in Finland in 1949, he immigrated to Australia in 1959. He studied at the South Australian School of Art, Western Teachers College, and Flinders University, graduating in 1972 with an Advanced Diploma in Teaching (Secondary Art). After teaching art for several years, he turned to full-time pottery in the late 1970s.
Working from studios in Magill and later Maylands in Adelaide, South Australia, Tuominen produced a wide range of domestic stoneware and one-off studio pieces for roughly two decades. His work is recognised for its dark, subdued earth-toned glazes (often tenmoku-style reduction glazes) and occasional decorative effects such as dribbled colour or matte surfaces. He also studied architectural ceramics and undertook further design study in Scandinavia. In later years he developed and hand-painted ceramic water purifiers under the Aquadome brand before focusing fully on art.
Parallel to his pottery, Tuominen explored ceramic paintings and clay reliefs, exhibiting these in the early 1980s (including a solo show at Beaver Galleries, Canberra in 1980, and Chameleon Gallery, Sydney in 1981). In 2014 his practice shifted toward a unique visual language: painting with clay, photographing the ephemeral forms and textures, and transforming the images into photomontage compositions. His website describes this as creating “new visual language” that bridges material clay work with digital photographic art.
