Petrus Spronk was born in Holland and emigrated to Australia in 1957. He completed undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at the South Australian School of Arts in the late 1960s, majoring in sculpture and ceramics. During the early 1970s, he lectured at Perth Technical College before adopting a peripatetic life, conducting workshops up and down the Western Australian coast, and spending eight years in travel to Northern Europe, America, Greece and Turkey. Returning to Australia in 1983, he set up a workshop at Port Pirie, SA, later moving to Daylesford, Victoria, where he still lives and works. He makes bowls of primal power, black in colour, burnished to look like coal, sometimes broken and reassembled, and decorated with gold in the manner of an icon. He is also known for a number of public commissions. Because his work is so distinctive, he rarely signs it, although some bowls have a spiral on the base.