Covering Ground – Ken Eastman
Galerie Marianne Heller, Heidelberg, 15 March 2020
Exhibition essay
Opening the exhibition year 2020 with the ‘Englischen Wochen’, Marianne Heller returns, to some extension, to the first starting point of her gallery which she founded in 1978 in Sandhausen as the ‘Galerie für englische Keramik’. It was founded with the intention to introduce the not so well-known field of ‘studio pottery’ to the local public which was in full flower in England at that time.
In more than 40 years since it was founded, the gallery has extended its program across the world. Artists across all continents take the chance to exhibit their art in Heidelberg where the gallery has its home since 1998. Vice versa, Heidelberg’s friends of ceramics could let their eyes wander across Europe, to North and Latin America, South-East Asia and Australia. Strong connections exist for several years now to Japan, where unintentionally, the circle closes, if you remember, that studio pottery in Great Britain wouldn’t be conceivable without the stimulus Bernard Leach brought back to his home country after his encounter with Shoji Hamada in Japan. This was one hundred years ago. In 1920 he and Shoji Hamada set up his studio in St. Ives which turned out to be the bridge between Japan and the UK to let pieces and ideas wander back and forth. Until now Marianne Heller also benefits from this connection and with her, all of you who like to come to these premises.
‘100 years St. Ives’ calls for a 100 years retrospective of the history of English ceramics, but even Marianne Heller might be challenged with this task. This task should be left for a museum, if it has been taken on somewhere it is unfortunately out of my knowledge. Maybe it is simply a coincidence that Marianne Heller picks up on the subject of English ceramics just now, showing works from the gallery’s early years under the title ‘At the beginning was the pot’ and, by showing Ken Eastman, an artist who absolutely represents this. His work has been, from the very beginning, dedicated to the vessel, but he lifts it out of the context of practical use and treats it as a unique plastic form.
Most of you know this, ladies and gentleman, as this is not the first time Ken Eastman is exhibiting at Gallery Heller. His first performance was 30 years ago, already in 1991, still at the Gallery in Sandhausen, he took part in the exhibition ‘Aspects of Sculpture’. Followed by ‘Towards the Future’ two years later when he was one of 30 younger ceramic artists, 15 from England and 15 from Germany, invited by Marianne Heller to mark the gallery’s 15thanniversary. Ken Eastman had his international breakthrough in 1995, if not before, with the ‘Premio Faenza’, the first of many international prizes. Ken Eastman remained loyal to Gallery Marianne Heller. He repeatedly exhibited, on his own in 1997 and together with other ceramicists, as in 2002 with Lawson Oyekan, who was also represented in the 1993 exhibition ‘Towards the Future’, and in 2007, with Ruth Duckworth (1919-2009), two years before her death, the Grande dame of Anglo-American ceramics, and finally in 2014 with Suku Park, whose work you may have experienced here last year with his solo exhibition.
After so many performances there shouldn’t really be the need any more to introduce Ken Eastman in Heidelberg. He has certainly been appreciated so many times that it is not possible to find an aspect in his art that hasn’t been recognised. But let me go back a few steps, back to 1993 to look at the exhibition ‘Towards the Future’, which I already mentioned earlier. Here it was that you could observe, as Alison Britton in her catalogue contribution found: ‘the attempt in British ceramics art to maintain the reference to the practicality, played a bigger role than anywhere in Europe’. Although this reference still exists, the practical functionality was moved into the background by a lot of ceramicists since the 1970s/1980s. This tendency continues in the generation born around 1960. Ken Eastman is one of them who exhibited in Sandhausen a piece from 1991 with the title ‘Twist Pot’, with 51cm length an impressive piece. It consisted of a flat and in curves swinging out base and vertical low side. You could call it a bowl, a bent or curved bowl, its form quoting the design and its title citing a modern dance of the 1950s.
‘Pots’ then were Ken Eastman’s topic. They were vessels, somehow to do with housekeeping, but obviously not intended for practical use. There were also cylinder shapes, the walls of which already started to curl up or had been fitted with all sorts of applications. Dominant colours were earthy, referring to the material the pots were made of. Perhaps the confrontation with the vessel, with ‘Form and Content’, that one of Eastman’s series from 1993[1] was called, and perhaps the confrontation in applied art of those years, not only with ceramics, have played an important role? Ken Eastman’s practice has been very wilful and unmistakeable from the very beginning.
This practice continued even when form and size of his vessels changed, removing the reducing strictness of the very early years. Alison Britton has pointed out the importance the encounter with architecture means to Ken and his work, as it is always about bringing volume into relation to each other[2] and to explore the ‘grammar of structures’.[3]
Reflecting in this context on his own approach, Ken Eastman talks about ‘experiencing our world as a complex organic system, that grows and changes in its kind and that we can’t explain with modernistic-linear systems of understanding.’[4]
His works of about 20 years are giving the answers to these experiences. They are, just like his earlier works, clay pieces of different size and strength assembled. Though, ‘assembled’ shouldn’t be understood as if prefabricated elements were put together according to a fixed plan. What Ken Eastman does is a risky balancing act. What the finished piece will look like, remains open until the very end. A decision has been made by choosing the first soft, flexible piece that was rolled out from a lump of clay - its format, its length, its height and its thickness that influence the behaviour of the material and its possibility to form it. Such decisions have to be made with every single step. They can take weeks. Ken Eastman himself says that at the beginning it is an intuitive and chaotic process out of which, very slowly, the shape of the objects emerges, with its slopes, curves, angles, lines and folds.
For the artist everything changes as soon as the piece is dry. The patched pile has changed into a firm body, something solid, but its actual essence is only brought to light by the use of colour.[5]
‘My overriding interest is making new coloured clay forms’, Ken Eastman says himself.[6]The colour is not just a phenomenon on the surface, it is fundamental. It can clarify the shape, can make it visible. That’s how Ken Eastman uses it often. But he also uses it to deprive a form of its definition, to blur the boundaries between the parts from which it is made of and to cover up the joins.
What maybe had to be emphasised with the ‘pots’- the fact that they don’t have any practical function- is evident in Ken Eastman’s later works. In the artist’s own words: ‘They are made purely for looking at – for joy’.[7] While earlier works were named ‘pot’ or once ‘familiar object’ and Ken Eastman didn’t really have to emphasize: ‘they are not about anything’ [8]. Newer works have titles. So they have a content, a meaning – claiming to be ‘works of art’ in the traditional sense, and as such, so could be added with the philosopher Gunter Figal, they challenged the understanding, the need to interpret them in order to become comprehensible – only repeated exegetical efforts give such works of art the opportunity to unfold in their complexity. [9]
Indeed, Ken Eastman’s ‘vessel’ sculptures are complex creations, whose form is never fully revealed from any single point of view. It is similar with their names. Take ‘Tree Line’, a work from last year, 2019, which contour, looked at from a certain point, may remind you of the outline of a sleek tree; its bulging looked at from another point might let you think of a gnarled trunk – but the smoothness of the surface? Birch bark might be this smooth sometimes but the colour doesn’t match. Maybe a plane tree, but only if you consider the bark alone. And why ‘Line’- we have got a ‘body’ in front of us? Is the curved line that first catches the eye, the one mentioned in the title, or could it be a different one, to evoke the association tree?
Where does the artist want to take us, which hints give us the, sometimes puzzling, titles of his works? The blue of ‘Sailwave’ might give the feeling of blissful swinging on the waves, the dark brown of plates layered on top of each other in ‘Years Go By’ might give a feeling of age - the weight of the years. In ‘Covering Ground’ a striding out movement may be visible, in ‘Supper at Emmaus’ - a surprising encounter of forms, when a dark brown part moves slowly into a lighter green part and maybe a trace of light might be visible which painter like Rembrandt or Caravaggio set into scene. Does this sculpture tell this touching story of shock and realization?
You could keep asking and would never come to an end. Why should we be at the better end than the artist himself, who confesses: ‘I go to the workshop to explore, to try to make things which I don’t understand and can’t explain, to ask questions rather than to find answers, to try to think with my hands.’ [10] Now, Ladies and Gentleman, capture yourself in the richness of this work, trace it down with your eyes, maybe even with your hands. Here is your opportunity now.
Peter Schmitt
[1] The Jerwood Prize for Applied Arts 1996: Ceramics. Kat. Crafts Council London 1996, p. 18 f
[2] The Raw and the Cooked. New Work in Clay in Britain. Kat. The Museum of Modern Art Oxford 1993, p. 32
[3] Edmund de Waal, Introduction. Kat. Constructions Ceramics and the Memory of Architecture. Galerie Marianne Heller, Heidelberg 1999, o.p. page 2
[4] Constructions, Ceramics and the memory of architecture, p 9
[5] Ken Eastman, On Making Pots 2007
[6] Ken Eastman, On Making Pots 2007
[7] Ken Eastman, On Making Pots 2007
[8] Zit. Nach Jane McCabe, Lares and Penates. Ken Eastman’s Recent Work, in Ceramic Review 153, May/June 1995
[9] Gunter Figal, Simplicity/Einfachheit. Ueber eine Schale von Young-Jae Lee, Freiburg 2014, p 33
[10] Zit. Nach David Whiting, Ken Eastman. The Cut of Light, in: Ceramic Monthly, Dec. 2019, p. 49