POWERHOUSE COLLECTION

'Something in blue' vessel by Ken Eastman

Object No. 2006/81/1

Born in 1960 in Herefordshire, England, Ken Eastman is today one of Britain's most respected ceramic artists. A graduate of the Edinburgh College of Art (1983) and the Royal College of Art in London (1987), he became interested in ceramics about 1979. He started regularly exhibiting his objects in 1991. Eastman is represented in collections in Britain and continental Europe, USA, Korea, Japan and Australia (Shepparton Art Gallery, Victoria). A recipient of many awards, in 2001 he was awarded gold medal at the World Ceramic Exposition in Korea. In 1998 Eastman moved from his small studio in Kimbolton to the much larger quarters in Hamnish (both hamlets near Leominster in Herefordshire). This was an important time in Eastman's career as the new studio prompted a change of direction: he tended to make rather small and simpler works until then, which nevertheless brought Eastman international recognition. 'Rise and Fall, a pair of two closed pots of 1995, for example, was awarded the prestigious first prize at the International Competition of Contemporary Ceramic Art in Faenza, the judges declaring that " it is impossible to imagine a lighter way of rendering such a heavy concept' (quoted in J.McCabe, Ken Eastman, behind the gates of clay', 2004, p.11). The new studio enabled Eastman to make much larger and complex works and 'Something in blue' was among the first vessels made in Hamnish. "In hindsight I can see that these pieces heralded something of a moving up in scale or at least height to anything that had come previously" says the artist*. As well as increasing the size of his works, Eastman began to work with clay in a softer state and the pieces were becoming more organic and fluid as can be seen in this example. The critic Jane McCabe noted at the time: '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... [they] seem to beg to be turned around and then turned again...' (J McCabe, 'Pots in place. Ken Eastman's ceramics', c1999). Many of Eastman's massive pots have strong architectural presence but they are also very sensual - they intrigue with their contrasting shapes and volumes, they charm with sophisticated conjunctions of colours, with their velvety, often appearing transparent surfaces wanting to be touched. Eastman's pots are never planned in advance - they grow spontaneously as he plays with forms and surfaces of still wet slabs of clay. He explains his philosophy: 'I do not make functional pots, but rather use the vessel as a subject to give form and expression'; 'part of the reason for making is to see things that I have never seen before - to built something that I can not fully understand or explain'.(www.keneastman.co.uk). * Correspondence with Ken Eastman, 2006 Eva Czernis-Ryl Curator, 2006