KEN EASTMAN

Barrett Marsden, London EC1

29 April - 11 June 2005

This was Ken Eastman's third solo show at Barrett Marsden. The last was in 2000, and the pots were definitely evolving then; although complex and segmented, they were developing a new, softer quality. Now, five years down the line, they are quite different creatures. It's not that there has been a radical shift in style; it's more that they have travelled so far in the direction of fluidity and abstraction that they have entered a new stylistic territory.

Gone are the straight lines and taut curves, the mapped-out, fitted together structures with their secretive spaces and walled enclosures, so often reminiscent of architecture both real and imagined. These new pots are altogether more fluid and rippling, their walls meandering in and out like ruffles of fabric, containing volumes that seem equally unfixed and transient. Whereas the earlier work related more to the out sides of structures - walls, roofs, entrances all featuring strongly - this body of work seems much more about indoors. There's femininity about its folds and hollows and a lack of robustness in the wavy contours. Perhaps it's something to do with the tops of the walls too, which have been rounded and occasionally flared - very subtly but just enough to suggest the beginning of a vessel rim. Made from still-wet slabs of clay, most of the pots are comprised of only three, plus a base. The slabs are thinner, only a few millimetres thick, and sometimes seem on the point of collapse, before, thankfully, connecting up with the next section, which gives at least a minimal support. Building such fragile, flimsy - while at the same time large-scale - constructions is no mean feat, even for a potter as long-armed and dextrous as Eastman. Less is definitely more when it comes to handling these soft expanses of clay, and somehow he has nudged and balanced them into shape without leaving so much as a finger mark. Using clay in this state is much more challenging than letting it harden and gather strength, but it's a challenge Eastman has purposely imposed. “They are not so much built as felt”: he says. Certainly they are much less obviously constructed than before, and although the making process is still very physically involving, there is a sense of detachment too, of the maker standing back and watching how the material behaves - of him lending a supporting hand, but not forcing the out come. In this, process becomes, to a large degree, the content. Freed up from figurative references the pots are no longer like anything in the physical world in the same way that the more architectural pieces were. Something about their scale and the relationship with buildings gave those earlier works a model-like quality, as if they were miniature versions of potentially larger constructions. But there is none of that feeling with these new pieces: they have acquired a real independence. They are empty and free.

Though the forms are new, the painting is characteristically Eastman. The surfaces are dense with coloured slips - the usual palette of rusty browns and reds, blue-greys and luminous sea greens and turquoise - and texturally rich with brush marks and overlayerings. Just as he embarks upon the form without a fixed image in his mind, so he approaches its bare surface. A colour, any colour, is a starting point, and gradually a rhythm emerges Eastman goes with the flow. Because he is not using colour to articulate a more complex form, there is a new feeling of freedom. Spheres and broad bands of contrasting shade and tone appear in an almost random sequence, the colours particularly intense as they move from shadow to light. More than ever it looks like Eastman is painting for pure pleasure. There is a lightness of touch, a sense of movement, so that sometimes the painted circles and fields of white seem to blow across the surface like weather.

Made with the speed and fluency the process demands, this new work takes the slab-built pot back to its beginnings. But in some ways its simplicity is as deceptive as its freeness: Eastman has chosen to work within self-imposed limitations in order to keep the process and his passion for it alive, and apparently it is under these intellectual, often austere, impositions that the creative impulse thrives best.