Mark Rayner explores unlikely juxtapositions between medium and subject, playing with traditional craft techniques to create objects and images that can be alternately construed as threatening, beguiling and absurd. His glazed plates and figurines are a modern and playful take on the grotesque; a style characterised by exaggeration, excess, the fantastic and sometimes the abject. In recent years, Rayner has begun to work across a variety of other media, including photography and latch hook rugs. His piece Little (a latch-hook rug portrait of Labour Party leader Andrew Little) caused a media stir when it was included in the Wallace Art Awards exhibition in 2016. Not one to shy away from the political, for the Point Blank exhibition Rayner has created a series of rather unflattering ceramic trophy heads of the vexed and vexatious POTUS.

Based in Whanganui, Rayner has been working in ceramics since 2003. He has work in many private collections throughout New Zealand, including several pieces in the collection of The Arts House Trust, and was a finalist in the Wallace Art Awards in 2011, 2014 and 2016 to 2018 inclusive.