Lauri Tuominen was born in Finland in 1949, he immigrated to Australia in 1959. He studied at the South Australian School of Art, Western Teachers College, and Flinders University, graduating in 1972 with an Advanced Diploma in Teaching (Secondary Art). After teaching art for several years, he turned to full-time pottery in the late 1970s.

Working from studios in Magill and later Maylands in Adelaide, South Australia, Tuominen produced a wide range of domestic stoneware and one-off studio pieces for roughly two decades. His work is recognised for its dark, subdued earth-toned glazes (often tenmoku-style reduction glazes) and occasional decorative effects such as dribbled colour or matte surfaces. He also studied architectural ceramics and undertook further design study in Scandinavia. In later years he developed and hand-painted ceramic water purifiers under the Aquadome brand before focusing fully on art.

Parallel to his pottery, Tuominen explored ceramic paintings and clay reliefs, exhibiting these in the early 1980s (including a solo show at Beaver Galleries, Canberra in 1980, and Chameleon Gallery, Sydney in 1981). In 2014 his practice shifted toward a unique visual language: painting with clay, photographing the ephemeral forms and textures, and transforming the images into photomontage compositions.