Chauncey Flay

Flay grew up in New Plymouth and studied art at the Auckland University of Technology. He then travelled to Germany and Poland before settling for a number of years in the Cook Islands. Though he recently returned to his hometown, the experience of living and working in the Islands remains a major influence on his practice.​

Chauncey's practice brings together a diverse range of materials including coral, concrete, brick and stone which he ties into a few key concepts around entropy, time, and our relationship with the physical world.

​The location and context of where the material comes from is an important aspect of the work. This is explored through a laborious and reductive physical process of deconstruction and reconstruction of materials from which an austere yet compelling aesthetic is produced.

​Chauncey turns commonplace materials into objects with value and meaning, completely shifting our appreciation of them.

“In all my works there is a physical process of breaking and putting back together. The language of geometry references architecture as a healing and rebuilding process. The faceting of stone is a slow and meditative reductive process that expresses the relationship between matter and time.”