KEN EASTMAN

Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham 15 April- 23 May Catalogue: £3.95

Ken Eastman is one of the most searingly minimal ceramic artists. His quiet, highly abstracted language seems more silent now than it ever was. Some years ago his vocabulary appeared to be a particularly ascetic development of Alison Britton's pots, but now he has moved away from those simply decorated curving constructions into other areas of concern. In his most radical departure yet from the traditional forms of the vessel, he is proving to be a sculptural ceramist of considerable resource.

The exhibition was set out in the form of a stark, but beautifully pitched installation, sensitively sited and lit, with three principal groupings of work. These consisted, firstly, of a large square of 16 Familiar Objects on the floor of the gallery, behind which, on a long shelf, were placed 24 so-called Cut out pieces. A third group, of five vessels, was displayed on a plinth, forming one end of a carefully measured rectangle of space. It was clear that though the pieces could be considered on their own merits, the groups were artistic statements in themselves, and the whole installation had its own architectural sense of order.

Eastman is a constructor. He has an intellectual, logical and rational approach to his work, which explores the shapes of things pared down and purified. This involves purity of approach - a methodical, time consuming pursuit of craftsmanship, which, in fact, results in highly succinct artistic statements. He uses a finely grogged stoneware clay which is rolled out into sheets and then assembled. His muted colours are applied in layers and fired - a process often repeated, until he achieves the deep matt, rather powdery quality of surface he likes. The subtleties of these surfaces play well with the gentle undulations and alterations of form, seen in his palest green Familiar Objects.

These may be geometric or more organic pieces, but all have elements of quiet dissent - walls gently curvilinear, slanting or pressing inward. These are fragmentary pieces, like relics from a stonemason's yard - formalised evocations of classical detail maybe, a piece of a torso, or perhaps a section from an Inca building. Some pieces suggest not only a condensed appreciation of architectural forms, but the softer curves of remembered landscapes. Eastman evokes other materials too; the clay can take on the quality of soapstone or certain types of marble. The pieces are hollow, but in fact he gives a sense of visual weight.

His series of large pale pots, Untitled, have the clearest connection with his earlier work, but here he strips - often quite literally – the vessel of its usual enclosing stability. These pieces are thinner, the walls more fragile. There is a crisp plasticity in the clay, but the forms at the very least are twisted, warped or listing. A box-like piece resembles something akin to Balsa wood or hardboard, but at least its structure looked firm. Two other pieces resembled wooden barrels with their staves in various states of collapse. "With their ochre interiors these objects again appeared to play on material ambiguity. Clay in its fixed and fired state appears to imitate the changing nature of wood - a transformation by which Eastman takes the material into a more fragile territory, the robust grandeur of his earlier pots now absent. These are objects of deliberate deviation.

Eastman is a spatial artist. He thinks long and hard about volume and enclosure, exploring and controlling these elements as succinctly as he can. His Cut outs are perhaps his most complex deliberations on form, but in their highly varied alterations of identically-sized square tiles of clay they are masterly statements about economy. By cutting a section, of varied shape, from the rest of the panel and then re-adding that section, in any way, to the slab, he gets considerable mileage from a simple idea. Again these mini-constructions have an architectural clarity of contour, characteristic of all his work, but they are also humorous and playful with their quiet colours and textures, one could be looking at pieces from a child's puzzle, a pastry cook's table or a carpenter's workbench. The work is not profound, but incisively probes a number of variations on a constructive theme.

Eastman works in dangerous territory and I, for one, remain suspicious of some of those on the current minimalist bandwagon. It can be an effective screen for a seriously poverty of imagination. Yet Ken Eastman is proving to be a consistently searching artist- producing highly crafted work in his quest to understand the complexity and contradictions of the space and forms around us.