About POAST

Laurie Poast, Norwegian-American, b. 1974

With a child's eyes in a far-off American farm village called Black Earth, Laurie Poast stared at story books in reverie of the land from which her ancestors came. Powerfully enchanting illustrations of the old world and her Mother’s stories of cobblestones, gardens, and little white horses created a deep and tender longing for her homeland.

Her aesthetic began there in her first years, where she spent her childhood in the workshop of the acclaimed Norwegian-American hardingfele luthier Ron Poast (http://bit.ly/nationalheritageaward), and in the immaculate English gardens and orchards on her grandparent's farm. Poast’s formal fine arts education in Madison, Wisconsin gave her mastery of the methods, materials, and history of art, while her business experience with numerous American companies and arts organizations, and the launch of her own company serving over 300 contracted artists and interior designers, led her to the launch of POAST Art & Design in Norway, where she works today.

With a modern Scandinavian design aesthetic, Poast creates tiny architectural sculptures inspired by the Norwegian, German and English homes her ancestors left behind when they emigrated to America in the 1800s, as well as by houses left by other emigrants from Switzerland, Italy, France, Greece, and other lands. Each tiny sculpture represents an emigrant family’s collective and historic memory of their ancestors’ homes. Colorless form and texture arch and bend the shadows around the pure white porcelain architectural objects, casting light onto the parts of our history that we remember, and shadow onto the parts forgotten. Standing alone or grouped in a wall installation of hundreds of tiny houses, these modern forms represent the most emotionally compelling sentiment of Poast’s emigrant culture: a sense of homeland.

Designed after the grand villas and small wooden houses of Norway’s cities, the log cabins and stabbur storehouses amidst the snow-capped mountains and beautiful fjords of Norway’s countryside, the decorative curves and nature-inspired ornaments of Paris' Art Nouveau apartment houses, Baron Haussmann's urban Parisian blocks, fifteenth-century pigeon houses of centuries-old French manors, the ancient limestone estates of the Burgundy countryside, the rustic old French country carriage houses of the old châteaux still standing in France today, the charming old half-timbered Fachwerkhauser in Germany, the white stone huts with conical limestone rooftops of the trullo houses amidst the rocky villages, vineyards and olive groves of 16th century Italy, the grass rooftops of the jutting rocky Faroe Islands in the sea, and the seventeenth-century canal houses of the Dutch Golden Age, these tiny houses are vessels that hold the histories of generations.

Poast’s work has been featured in major publications and blogs including The Huffington Post, Homes and Gardens Magazine UK, HGTV (Home & Garden Television) online, Apartment Therapy, NRC Netherlands national newspaper, Air Canada's EnRoute Magazine, Sweet Paul Magazine, West Elm, Remodelista, Etsy Blog, Design Mom, and more. Her design products have been featured at Dutch Design Week 2011, Hjertholm på Galleriet Bergen, Julemarked i Bergen: design og kunsthåndverk, Designernes eget Julemarked Oslo, and are available through stockists in the USA, Australia, and Norway.