Kenneth C Eastman (born 1960 in

Watford Watford () is a town and non-metropolitan district with Borough status in the United Kingdom, borough status in Hertfordshire, England, northwest of Central London, on the banks of the River Colne, Hertfordshire, River Colne. Initially a smal ...

) is an English ceramic artist, best known for his austere, flat bottomed, slab built

ceramic A ceramic is any of the various hard, brittle, heat-resistant, and corrosion-resistant materials made by shaping and then firing an inorganic, nonmetallic material, such as clay, at a high temperature. Common examples are earthenware, porcela ...

vessels. He exhibits internationally and has won various awards in the field of

ceramic art Ceramic art is art made from ceramic materials, including clay. It may take varied forms, including artistic pottery, including tableware, tiles, figurines and other sculpture. As one of the plastic arts, ceramic art is a visual art. While ...

s, including the Italian

Premio Faenza The Premio Faenza is an international prize for contemporary ceramic art. It is awarded by the Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in Faenza, in Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy, and is the principal Italian prize of its kind. History The ...

in 1995, the ‘Gold Medal’ at the World Ceramic Exposition 2001 Korea and the ‘President De la Generalitat Valencia’at the 5th Biennale International De Ceramica, Manises, Spain. In 1998 he was awarded the Arts Foundation Fellowship in Ceramics. He was elected as a member of the International Academy of Ceramics in 2003. Alongside his studio work, Eastman also works as an Academic Researcher within the Design School of the

Glasgow School of Art The Glasgow School of Art (GSA; ) is a higher education art school based in Glasgow, Scotland, offering undergraduate degrees, post-graduate awards (both taught and research-led), and PhDs in architecture, fine art, and design. These are all awa ...

. Eastman's work at the Glasgow School of Art ended in 2011 when the School closed .He is represented in the UK by the Marsden-Woo Gallery, London. Eastman was shortlisted for the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize in 2024.

Education

Eastman studied Ceramics at

Edinburgh College of Art Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) is one of eleven schools in the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. Tracing its history back to 1760, it provides higher education in art and design, architecture, histor ...

from 1979 to 1983 and at the

Royal College of Art The Royal College of Art (RCA) is a public university, public research university in London, United Kingdom, with campuses in South Kensington, Battersea and White City, London, White City. It is the only entirely postgraduate art and design uni ...

, in London, from 1984 to 1987.

Artistic style

While in Edinburgh, Eastman worked mainly in Raku. After arriving at the Royal College of Art in London he experimented in various ways of working with ceramic form, including sculpture, before confining himself to painting on rectangle ceramic platter shapes in a style very much in the spirit of

Gillian Ayres Gillian Ayres (3 February 1930 – 11 April 2018) was an English painter. She is best known for abstract painting and printmaking using vibrant colours, which earned her a Turner Prize nomination. Early life and education Gillian Ayres was bo ...

, an artist whose work he greatly admired at the time. For many years his making has centered around a slab building technique using painted ceramic colours and oxides. Craftscotland, a charity which supports Scottish crafts, describes his current work as centring on the idea of the vessel, pointing out that he has never made functional work, but uses the vessel as a subject - "''to give meaning and form to an expression''". David Whiting, on the other hand, states "''Eastman is not so easy to classify. One tires of that lazy and over-used term “abstract vessel” when describing his work, because it is glib and reductive ....... Clearly, Ken Eastman is a maker of sculpture that evolves and works on its own terms, but is also a more concentrated – for now – response to the shape of things, to the world seen and felt''". Eastman has said of his own work "''Part of the reason for making (in fact a very large part of the reason) is to see things that I have never seen before - to build something that I can not fully understand or explain.''"Ken Eastman, profile

Selected public collections

Victoria & Albert Museum The Victoria and Albert Museum (abbreviated V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.8 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and named after Queen ...

UK *

Crafts Council The Crafts Council is the national development agency for contemporary craft in the United Kingdom, and is funded by Arts Council England. History The Crafts Advisory Committee was formed in 1971 to advise the Minister for the Arts, David Eccle ...

UK *

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge The Fitzwilliam Museum is the art and antiquities museum of the University of Cambridge. It is located on Trumpington Street opposite Fitzwilliam Street in central Cambridge. It was founded in 1816 under the will of Richard FitzWilliam, 7th Vi ...

UK *

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), is an art museum located in the Houston Museum District of Houston, Texas. The permanent collection of the museum spans more than 5,000 years of history with nearly 80,000 works from six continents. Follow ...

, United States

References

External links

Official website

Education

Artistic style

Selected public collections

References

External links

Further reading