Ben Pearce b. 1982

Born in Palmerston North in 1982, Ben Pearce completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts majoring in Sculpture at Wanganui Quay School of Fine Arts in 2003. Exhibiting regularly in New Zealand, Pearce has work held in the public collection of the Sargeant Gallery, Wanganui, and in prominent private collections throughout New Zealand, Australia, the U.K and the U.S.A. He is featured in Warwick Brown’s book Seen this Century, featuring 100 contemporary New Zealand artists. 

Ben Pearce's work comes from a fascination with the duality of objects and plays with the divide between the functional and decorative to create a perfect tension between the utilitarian object and its status as an artwork. Comprised of wood, metal, stone or found objects, his sculptures appear sometimes as naive structures or architectural experiments, as they do mysterious objects or vestiges from some other time and place.

Pearce's work has been exhibited at City Gallery, Wellington, Te Uru, Auckland, Suter Art Gallery, Nelson, Tauranga Art Gallery, MTG Hawkes Bay, Napier, and Hastings City Art Gallery. In 2022, he was the inaugural recipient of the $30,000 ARA Art Award in Hawke's Bay and in the same year he created Paper Pals Aotearoa - a large scale four plinth public commission for the Wellington Sculpture Trust, exhibited in the forecourt of Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington.