KEN EASTMAN/BARRETT MARSDEN GALLERY, LONDON

摘要

November Night, dark grainy footage reveals an urban landscape, tall menacing buildings, a car headlight moves into view, hesitates, turns away. Checkpoint Charlie. Or is it moonlight, that patch? Now it withdraws, it has become a vessel: tall slabs of clay stuck together I am tantalized, then disappointed. There had been the possibility of a story here, but the demands of the vessel asserted itself so sternly. It could have been a fascinating tease, but Such are the technical demands of this kind of structure, that the tease is chastened as the form intervenes. The need to ensure a secure base had somehow robbed it of its mystery. The potential danger had been made safe. Let's return to Checkpoint Charlie for a moment. Forget the vertical planes, 'the interaction between form and surface' and other worthy craft ceramic platitudes, trotted out like a party line in Eastman's most recent artist's statement, (Axis Dec. 2002), and instead consider Shoreline, Field, One Afternoon and November Night. Lyrical titles invite the viewer to engage with this work and seek a narrative. Field contains a play on words, with fields of light and colour, as well as a suggestion of gamboling lambs and canoodling lovers. Move around this work, and the insistent demands of these slightly lumpen forms interfere again: and this in spite of the gracefully curving, upward reaching lines.