Pots in Place

Ken Eastman's Ceramics

Article by Jane McCabe

I placed a jar in Tennessee

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

Wallace Stevens

Ken Eastman has placed 16 of his newest pots in my loft. Nothing like a hill in Tennessee, it is a long light space that runs the length of our 17th cent­ury farmhouse near the Welsh border in Shropshire.

Hardly a wilderness, hardly slovenly, it is a spare place, flooded by northern light. However, the anal­ogy holds. Not only do the pots seem to be trans­formed by their situation, the actual space is recreated. What was a still silent place is now equipped with tangible energy.

I should make it clear that I am neither a pot man­iac nor a millionaire. Eastman wanted to move these lat­est pots out of his tiny studio in the back garden of his equally tiny cottage near Leominster, a small market town 10 miles from here. Maybe it was like placing them on a hill in Tennessee. He comes here quite often and moves them around, creating a variety of configurations and still-life dances, looking at them in relation to each other and looking at each alone.

These new pots, both in their setting and in their shape, contrast quite subtly and importantly with the pots that featured in his 1995 exhibition at Contemporary Applied Arts in London. Most of those

pots were meticulously arranged to be equidistant on a plinth as on a shelf. Although each was clearly autonomous and stood quite separate from its fellows, the ultimate effect was of a dynamic community, a complex sentence. The pots were much the same size - 20 cm (8 in) interrupted cylinders. They were grounded; their capacity like drums, they played a silent inner music. They were the colour of earth ­ terra cotta, rust, sage, burnished gold.

The new pots are blue and white. They seem to be made of light and shadow, sky and cloud. They are at once hard and supple, solid and translucent, dense and transparent, stone and water. They are still and yet they dance. All these pots are open. In fact their interiors are often as compelling as their outer walls. Each pot folds on itself and so casts its own permanent shadow. But the shadow is more a reflection. The natural shadow that each pot casts inside itself is reinforced and brought to life by the painting. Indeed, these are the most 'painted' Eastman pots I have seen. The brush strokes are apparent and palpable. This group of pots are all murky, variable cobalt blue, partly over-painted in a gauze-like, almost limpid white. Sometimes the paler areas seem almost decorative but most often the exterior painting more or less - and this proximity is fascinating - echoes or cannily distorts the interior. None of the pots is straight. They all seem to lean and list and turn. Together they make a fabulous choreography. And this apparent movement is not just in the irregular shapes made by the irregular folding, it is in the variety of lines and colour, the way the lines of blue and areas of white playoff each other. Although this phenomenon is most easily seen in the grouping of the pots, it is also evident in each pot as light and colour move within each vessel. The pots seem to beg to be turned around, and then turned again.

More surprising in this new troupe are several pots of quite different dimensions. I am now looking at four of them. Two are wide and huge, two much smaller and more delicate. The large ones remind me of pale, raised elephant footprints. The slabs are still folded but the effect is much more seamless. In fact the straight or angled seam line is in direct con­trast to the willowy, meandering lip - a dance of its own. Although tall, their mouths are so wide that they look stocky next to their more elegant blue neighbours. They are entirely pale, all mottled bluish, greyish white. They lean and bend and bulge; they lift and stay; turn in on themselves, turn out. These pots are at once plodders and flyers: gravitas et levitas.

More like birds in every way are the two smaller pots. They are less than 30 cm (1 ft) high, less than 15 cm (6 in) wide. The day Eastman brought them here, .cradling them like birds with damaged wings; I thought they had been broken on the journey. But, utterly whole, they are built in two separate pieces; one half seems to shelter and protect the other. Although they are literally only bound by the base, it is really space and air that bind them together. They suggest a door that is simultaneously opening and closing. These cylinders are also interrupted, but the interruption is a fragile pause, a pause which creates a balance between stability and freedom.

When Eastman first brought his pots to my loft, he rearranged them several times. One did not please him, and continued to displease him. He took it away and after repainting it several times, he destroyed it. At first I was appalled, reflecting in my non-professional way that it was not that bad. The point, of course, was that it was not right. I admire this artistic integrity, his insistence that his pots should truly embody his intentions.

Of course, these intentions are silent in the clay that expresses them. And to ascribe verbal meaning to what is ultimately and entirely non-verbal, to a con­struction of earth and water, can lead not only to self­ delusion but also to self-indulgent falsity. Now that Eastman has taken away his pots, the loft is a different place. Although the pots were quiet in themselves, they created movement by their shape, by their colour. And they created the space around them. And that space is no longer there.

Jane McCabe is a literary critic who taught at Harvard University for ten years and more recently at New York University's London extension at The Royal Court Theatre.