Ken Eastman - ceramics

BM Gallery, exhibition essay by Tanya Harrod June 2000

Ken Eastman used to be taken by his father on visits to the Tate Gallery to study the Pre-Raphaelites. They would hurry past a big Anthony Caro sculpture, painted red with floating planes - the 1962 piece called Early One Morning. Eastman remembers being thrilled by it, by the way in which art could be "mysterious and dangerous". Since switching to ceramics at Edinburgh from landscape architecture at Herriot Watt University back in 1980, Eastman has been "trying to make things I've never seen before". It is a neat expression of his ambitions and suggests something of the surprise and strangeness of the work, especially the majestic array of big pieces which we see here.

I last had a protracted talk with Eastman ten years ago, on the eve of his first solo exhibition. It was impossible not to like the pieces he was making then. His haunting references to architectural activity - earthworks, sea walls, the piazza, the Colosseum - were emphasised by pale mural-like surfaces built up with layers of oxides and slips. He has moved studios twice since then and now inhabits a relatively large workspace which he has converted himself. It is overlooked by a small room he has created for drawing, thinking and contemplating which is reached by a narrow steep staircase. Up there, to my surprise, was a whole other group of pieces, entirely different in mood and scale, simpler, odder and more playful. .

This is a good time for Eastman, reflected.in the brave variousness of his latest output. The new studio seems important in this context. For his last big show in 1998 at the Angel Row Gallery in Nottingham Eastman showed a series of what he called cut-outs. These were acute, pure simplifications of the slab-building process, each being formed from an exact square of clay from which a piece was cut and then made to stand in three dimensions, like a misplaced shadow or a commentary on the negative space left behind. I found them captivating but they were very much the products of a small workspace - needs must. Now Eastman can work on a big scale and study his work from new surprising angles - looking down from the stair onto the workshop for instance.

The scale and complexity of this latest body of work and the current optimism and the confidence of their creator are closely linked. Eastman's energy and happiness are so completely in evidence right now - the spring in his step, his delight in the woodpecker in the garden, his talk of poetry and music, his pleasure in his family. This does not mean that the work lacks gravitas. Some of these pieces are even sombre and most are mysterious like Tango which appears to move and sway, an odd synthesis of pot, eccentric architectural space and passages of colour.

Then again, the tall mainly blue and grey pieces like Weight were created with immense physical difficulty. Struggles with gravity are intrinsic to these new pots as Eastman props and holds a material that is oscillating with tension. It is not easy to slab-build large pieces of damp clay. It involves lifting, balancing and stabilising, using a knee, teeth even, to hold the thing up and a hairdrier to get the clay to harden.

Eastman likes contemporary poetry, particularly the work of Seamus Heaney and Christopher Reid. Reid, a friend, was once called a Martian poet because his writing made quotidian things seem unfamiliar, as if glimpsed by another kind of being from another planet. What

would a Martian make of the sight of Eastman struggling with his wet slabs of clay, quite alone, sometimes the radio on, sometimes the radio off? The potter is a bit of a poet too and he is quite aware of the strangeness of his activities - "I spend my life joining bits of clay". But over the past ten years he has got better and better at it and now sets about making a pot with a baroque freedom.

Eastman's pots were never planned out in advance - which might seem to be the potential advantage of slab-building. They happened. But whereas ten years ago the results suggested a kind of vernacular architecture - the sort of thing illustrated in Bernard Rudofsky's book Architecture without Architects - now his work is altogether more complex and orchestral. Architecture has kept pace with him and a monumental piece called Kite is nicely coterminous with Gehris Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

It is important not to push the architectural analogy too far. It is seductive, especially if we attend to the rims of these latest pieces - they seem like skylines - and to the bases which in the case of Kite seem to demand the presence of a small figure, dwarfed by the pot's undulating presence. Eastman tries to explain his work every which way and he is eloquent. But it is hard to talk about his pots in terms of the ceramic tradition and not altogether right, either, just to tackle them as straight sculpture. Tony Cragg is a sculptor whom Eastman admires and they share an ability to make work which seems both distinctly odd, yet familiar. Eastman talks of making "something clashing in tune" which sounds about right, articulating his dissonance and his passages of harmony - and some of the mystery and danger he first experienced as a small boy.

"Ken Eastman"