Education
Eastman studied Ceramics at Edinburgh College of Art from 1979 to 1983 and at the Royal College of Art, in London, from 1984 to 1987.
Eastman studied Ceramics at Edinburgh College of Art from 1979 to 1983 and at the Royal College of Art, in London, from 1984 to 1987.
In 1998 he was awarded the Arts Foundation Fellowship in Ceramics. Alongside his studio work, Eastman also works as an Academic Researcher within the Design School of the Glasgow School of Artist He is represented in the United Kingdom by the Marsden-Woo Gallery, London.
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, an artist whose work he greatly admired at the time. Foreign 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 "Participant 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.".
He was elected as a member of the International Academy of Ceramics in 2003.