About
Porcelain Bear is a design studio characterised by an experimental exploration of its namesake material. Traversing the worlds of furniture, lighting and object d’art, the Melbourne based studio is distinguished by its unique marriage of traditional techniques with contemporary technology.
Led by the artisanship of Gregory Bonasera. Porcelain Bear strives to reimagine porcelain in a decidedly contemporary manner, exploring its boundaries while inventing entirely new applications that respond to the needs of the world’s leading interior design and architecture practices.
Gregory Bonasera
Gregory’s passion for ceramics started early in his life, fostered by his parents when they replaced his much loved plastic toy potter’s wheel with a real one in 1975. Carrying this love for his craft into adulthood, Gregory has been practicing as a designer-maker since graduating from Monash University with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Ceramic Design in 1988. His final year portfolio consisted of furniture, lighting and sculptural toy robots made from slip cast porcelain and painted with automotive and machine paints, steel and cast glass. Early in his professional career, Gregory was awarded a three month studio residency in Northern Italy in 1991 through the Australia Council’s Visual Arts Board.
Throughout his 25-year career, Gregory has continued to hone his skills as a designer and artisan. Adding computer aided design (CAD) to his skill set in the late 1990s, Gregory now collaborates with industrial designer Anthony Raymond working under the banner of Porcelain Bear. An early adopter and local pioneer of CAD design in studio ceramics, Gregory’s work has been exhibited in Europe, the UK, the USA, Throughout Asia and locally. He is highly respected among his peers as a skilled designer, mould maker and craftsman.
