Laurie Poast is a visual aesthete with an academic background in the sciences. Before studying art at university, she was educated in business with minor study in behavioral neuroscience, philosophy, music, modern dance, and literature. This course of study led her to explore what value lies at the intersections of seemingly disparate disciplines which we have historically worked to separate. Here, she found, precisely at these intersections, is where innovation takes root.
Laurie Poast Atelier houses a product design studio, a fine art sculptural practice, and the Poast design brand. The brand offers artisan-crafted objects of art and decoration directly to the consumer, to the interior architecture trade, and through retailers internationally. The studio has collaborated in design, prototyping, production, and marketing with other public and private industry stakeholders. Many sculptural works by Poast are in noteworthy collections worldwide.
Working with ceramic, wood, metal, plaster, cement, fiberglass, resin, and other materials is very natural to Poast, having grown up under the wings of half-built airplanes and with curls and curious shapes of wood underfoot. Her father, a nationally acclaimed violin luthier, was a builder of beautiful structures like flying machines and classic automobiles, musical instruments, furniture, facades, and rooftops. The workshop is where she played, and her play grew quite inevitably into her work. So after working in business for many years in the United States, she moved to Europe in 2009 and began her professional artistic practice.
Collectors of Poast’s work connect with the minimalist nature of it: the intentional absence of everything that distracts from what is most beautiful. In the acquisition of Poast’s art, we curate our own moments of pleasure; of calm; of delight of the visual sense. With her spheres and curves and angles and proportions, we put social and emotional chaos into order; we see form created out of unformed elements; we see discordant things arranged into mathematical and artistic harmony. Poast’s work offers collectors an instinctive closeness to their own sense of beauty.
