The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
Clean contours, geometric and biomorphic shapes, monochromatic surfaces, and combinations of organic and inorganic materials: diagnostic features of modern design have long made the sculptures of ceramic artist David East instances of formalist inquiry.
As such, East’s works have been as self-investigative as aesthetically analytical, constituting a complex inquiry into his relationship with the kind of modernist forms pervasive in what he describes as “the mammoth amount of visual culture
that I grew up with.” To this project, reflection on habits of visual perception has been more relevant than any forays into personality psychology; East is not sculpting biography or reflecting on the subliminal implications of a retro-oriented
taste. Rather, his work engages a conditioned tendency to perceive the world through a lens calibrated by modern design. With respect to the built environment, the consequences of his investigations can be associatively poetic. “The suburban
home,” he asserts, “is like a gloriously hideous cross-section of modernity. If you could cut through a Brancusi sculpture, would it reveal the ranch house in the interior?”
Forms and Compositions
Such singular questions have inspired East’s work for more than two decades, but his means of posing and answering them have evolved, both visually and conceptually. His early sculptures combined statistical mapping of data about his own daily domestic
activities with glazed blueprints of ranch-style house plans, evocations of three-dimensional molecular models, and hues matched to a Martha Stewart palette of interior paints. In subsequent years, he explored forms evocative of molded baseboards
and cornices and, in the mid-2010s, began the move toward increased abstraction, producing works such as Monument of the Second Class, which seems at once a simplified cross-section of molding and a more mysterious something on the tip of
the tongue. Intended to evoke a resonance, or “ghost,” of a previous device or structure, Monument was indicative of a series in which East attempted to position his works “between the known (i.e., forms that have become
somewhat prosaic: bits of colonial trim, bits of familiar suburban ornament) [and] an abstracted unknown pulled from the most basic and classical architectural gestures: an arch, an opening.”
An important consequence of such positioning—the implication that an underlying set of general architectural forms (the arch, the column, etc.) recurs in various applications of modern design—was East’s interest in collage, a practice
of composition in which discrete forms are extracted from one context and integrated into another. Since 2018, East has drawn particular inspiration from the technique, which became especially important when the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted access
to his ceramics facilities. Although conceived as compositions in their own right, the collages have been instrumental in effecting a shift in East’s sculpture toward a fuller appreciation of two-dimensional shape as well as three-dimensional
form. “Collage is one of the more flexible bodies of my work,” East says. “Often the collages come from my exploration of The World of Interiors, an expensive, glossy British architectural and interior design magazine. The
images have this almost awkward sense of overabundance.”
Design Borrowings
East’s practice has primarily involved scavenging discrete shapes from that overabundance rather than lifting larger sections of compositions from the photographs or the interiors they represent. These borrowings—the scalloped shape of the
Sixties “gingerbread” architectural trim, for example—are generally not unique to the photographs, but rather could be considered equivalent to the words that the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters clipped from newspaper headlines as material
for his collages. That is, they tend to be reusable, rearrangeable morphemes, or units of language, in this case, the language of form in modern design. East’s identification of these simple elements in the magazine illustrations is, in other
words, not a discovery of new shapes but rather a recognition of shapes frequently encountered in modern design, particularly in the visual environment of East’s own early life. Silhouettes of these shapes have proved to be easily transferable
from the collages into ceramic sculpture, where they tend to define planes in geometric compositions.
Such transferral is easily visualized in two openwork sculptures, Neue Cairn and Blue Screen, in which East has created gridded scaffolds carrying perpendicular shapes that partially interrupt the line of sight. Although these shapes
have their immediate origins in details of The World of Interiors photographs, their familiarity in the context of modernism makes East’s works evocative of early-to mid-20th-century art in general. The negative forms created by the
grid-like frameworks of Neue Cairn and Blue Screen recall Giacometti’s emphasis on the animate potential of empty space in such surrealist works as Reclining Woman Who Dreams or The Palace at Four A.M. The
frameworks themselves, shallow, three-dimensional structures, share characteristics with Ibram Lassaw’s welded open-work sculptures, and the shapes carried by those structures recall the biomorphic stone slabs in Isamu Noguchi’s Kouros.
At the same time, both Neue Cairn and Blue Screen can be compared to modern architecture, the grid being a recurring element in the International Style in which empty spaces between the vertical and horizontal lines were preserved
in buildings by the use of plate glass, as in Philip Johnson’s Glass House or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Chicago Federal Center.
The horizontal format of Blue Screen also encourages comparison to the kind of platform-framed wall typical of American suburban homes in the 20th century and beyond. The vertical and horizontal planes forming the grid-like structure of Blue Screen are
analogous to stick members (studs, wall plates, and lintels). The shapes attached to them—the silhouettes borrowed through collage from illustrations in The World of Interiors—become, in that context, equivalent to bits of wall sheathing:
remnants of exterior plywood and fiberboard and interior sheetrock. The composition would become somewhat more complex in Neue Cairn. “Blue Screen presents itself pretty simply,” East notes on this point. “There’s
essentially a front and a back to the piece, but Neue Cairn has a different kind of density. It takes Blue Screen and multiplies it by two. There are layers in between that interrupt the interior in a different way. Neue Cairn essentially
takes that screen idea and explores it more densely.”
Architectural Gestures
If Neue Cairn alludes to utilitarian design, its referent seems less modern architecture than modern furniture. Into that subject, East made forays four years earlier through such works as Takes a Skew, in which a glazed ceramic form
resembling three laterally conjoined loaves of bread sit atop an oval plywood pedestal resembling a dining room table. Reviving that ceramic form in the later Yellow Back, Skew—adding a fourth arched unit and situating the
whole atop a single base of perpendicular slotted plywood sheets—East created what might pass as a model of a modernist upholstered stool. The origin of the ceramic form (loaves of bread and tufted leather seats aside) is hinted at in the sculpture’s
title: skew being a reference to skew arches and the shape of the bricks that compose them. The yellow glaze on one edge of the ceramic form is another clue. “Just think about the silhouette as the beginning of an extrusion,” East explains.
“I lived in Brooklyn, so I spent a lot of time in the subway. If you look at the ceilings there, you see that they were all made with sprung arches. The basic motif allows us to cross empty spaces. The architectural gesture then gets used decoratively
in the history of the gingerbread kind of shingle: some of the things that grow out of the Arts and Crafts movement in terms of wooden decorations on buildings. That rectangle bisecting a circle is an alluring shape to me.”
Although the shapes in East’s recent ceramic sculptures may be traceable back to collaged elements clipped from magazine photographs, from there back to modernist-design morphemes, and ultimately to origins in more general “architectural gestures,”
in the end his works are not mere lessons in the genealogy of form. The sculptures, while provoking architectural associations, are handmade and deliberately permissive of irregularity, a quality also encouraged by the frothy, undulating glazes developed
for their surfaces. East is clearly willing to relinquish precision in favor of epiphanies. “It’s all as un-techy as possible,” he explains. “I cut shapes out of slabs, explore them, and see what happens to them as they build
up over time. I pull from architectural iconography, things like the arch that starts to become more like the details on a house from the early 20th century: those references driven by an interest in the mystery and technology behind the desire to
span two walls. My original intention with the screens was to make things more transparent, to make the whole process very open. Despite that, there’s something elusive that happens through the combination of these simple gestures. There’s
something about extricating a form from an architectural space that’s endlessly interesting to me. It changes the way you look at things. Is someone taking this out of its context? How does it function anymore? It still seems familiar, but suddenly
you’re not sure.”
the author Glen R. Brown is a professor of art history at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas.
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The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
Clean contours, geometric and biomorphic shapes, monochromatic surfaces, and combinations of organic and inorganic materials: diagnostic features of modern design have long made the sculptures of ceramic artist David East instances of formalist inquiry. As such, East’s works have been as self-investigative as aesthetically analytical, constituting a complex inquiry into his relationship with the kind of modernist forms pervasive in what he describes as “the mammoth amount of visual culture that I grew up with.” To this project, reflection on habits of visual perception has been more relevant than any forays into personality psychology; East is not sculpting biography or reflecting on the subliminal implications of a retro-oriented taste. Rather, his work engages a conditioned tendency to perceive the world through a lens calibrated by modern design. With respect to the built environment, the consequences of his investigations can be associatively poetic. “The suburban home,” he asserts, “is like a gloriously hideous cross-section of modernity. If you could cut through a Brancusi sculpture, would it reveal the ranch house in the interior?”
Forms and Compositions
Such singular questions have inspired East’s work for more than two decades, but his means of posing and answering them have evolved, both visually and conceptually. His early sculptures combined statistical mapping of data about his own daily domestic activities with glazed blueprints of ranch-style house plans, evocations of three-dimensional molecular models, and hues matched to a Martha Stewart palette of interior paints. In subsequent years, he explored forms evocative of molded baseboards and cornices and, in the mid-2010s, began the move toward increased abstraction, producing works such as Monument of the Second Class, which seems at once a simplified cross-section of molding and a more mysterious something on the tip of the tongue. Intended to evoke a resonance, or “ghost,” of a previous device or structure, Monument was indicative of a series in which East attempted to position his works “between the known (i.e., forms that have become somewhat prosaic: bits of colonial trim, bits of familiar suburban ornament) [and] an abstracted unknown pulled from the most basic and classical architectural gestures: an arch, an opening.”
An important consequence of such positioning—the implication that an underlying set of general architectural forms (the arch, the column, etc.) recurs in various applications of modern design—was East’s interest in collage, a practice of composition in which discrete forms are extracted from one context and integrated into another. Since 2018, East has drawn particular inspiration from the technique, which became especially important when the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted access to his ceramics facilities. Although conceived as compositions in their own right, the collages have been instrumental in effecting a shift in East’s sculpture toward a fuller appreciation of two-dimensional shape as well as three-dimensional form. “Collage is one of the more flexible bodies of my work,” East says. “Often the collages come from my exploration of The World of Interiors, an expensive, glossy British architectural and interior design magazine. The images have this almost awkward sense of overabundance.”
Design Borrowings
East’s practice has primarily involved scavenging discrete shapes from that overabundance rather than lifting larger sections of compositions from the photographs or the interiors they represent. These borrowings—the scalloped shape of the Sixties “gingerbread” architectural trim, for example—are generally not unique to the photographs, but rather could be considered equivalent to the words that the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters clipped from newspaper headlines as material for his collages. That is, they tend to be reusable, rearrangeable morphemes, or units of language, in this case, the language of form in modern design. East’s identification of these simple elements in the magazine illustrations is, in other words, not a discovery of new shapes but rather a recognition of shapes frequently encountered in modern design, particularly in the visual environment of East’s own early life. Silhouettes of these shapes have proved to be easily transferable from the collages into ceramic sculpture, where they tend to define planes in geometric compositions.
Such transferral is easily visualized in two openwork sculptures, Neue Cairn and Blue Screen, in which East has created gridded scaffolds carrying perpendicular shapes that partially interrupt the line of sight. Although these shapes have their immediate origins in details of The World of Interiors photographs, their familiarity in the context of modernism makes East’s works evocative of early-to mid-20th-century art in general. The negative forms created by the grid-like frameworks of Neue Cairn and Blue Screen recall Giacometti’s emphasis on the animate potential of empty space in such surrealist works as Reclining Woman Who Dreams or The Palace at Four A.M. The frameworks themselves, shallow, three-dimensional structures, share characteristics with Ibram Lassaw’s welded open-work sculptures, and the shapes carried by those structures recall the biomorphic stone slabs in Isamu Noguchi’s Kouros. At the same time, both Neue Cairn and Blue Screen can be compared to modern architecture, the grid being a recurring element in the International Style in which empty spaces between the vertical and horizontal lines were preserved in buildings by the use of plate glass, as in Philip Johnson’s Glass House or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Chicago Federal Center.
The horizontal format of Blue Screen also encourages comparison to the kind of platform-framed wall typical of American suburban homes in the 20th century and beyond. The vertical and horizontal planes forming the grid-like structure of Blue Screen are analogous to stick members (studs, wall plates, and lintels). The shapes attached to them—the silhouettes borrowed through collage from illustrations in The World of Interiors—become, in that context, equivalent to bits of wall sheathing: remnants of exterior plywood and fiberboard and interior sheetrock. The composition would become somewhat more complex in Neue Cairn. “Blue Screen presents itself pretty simply,” East notes on this point. “There’s essentially a front and a back to the piece, but Neue Cairn has a different kind of density. It takes Blue Screen and multiplies it by two. There are layers in between that interrupt the interior in a different way. Neue Cairn essentially takes that screen idea and explores it more densely.”
Architectural Gestures
If Neue Cairn alludes to utilitarian design, its referent seems less modern architecture than modern furniture. Into that subject, East made forays four years earlier through such works as Takes a Skew, in which a glazed ceramic form resembling three laterally conjoined loaves of bread sit atop an oval plywood pedestal resembling a dining room table. Reviving that ceramic form in the later Yellow Back, Skew—adding a fourth arched unit and situating the whole atop a single base of perpendicular slotted plywood sheets—East created what might pass as a model of a modernist upholstered stool. The origin of the ceramic form (loaves of bread and tufted leather seats aside) is hinted at in the sculpture’s title: skew being a reference to skew arches and the shape of the bricks that compose them. The yellow glaze on one edge of the ceramic form is another clue. “Just think about the silhouette as the beginning of an extrusion,” East explains. “I lived in Brooklyn, so I spent a lot of time in the subway. If you look at the ceilings there, you see that they were all made with sprung arches. The basic motif allows us to cross empty spaces. The architectural gesture then gets used decoratively in the history of the gingerbread kind of shingle: some of the things that grow out of the Arts and Crafts movement in terms of wooden decorations on buildings. That rectangle bisecting a circle is an alluring shape to me.”
Although the shapes in East’s recent ceramic sculptures may be traceable back to collaged elements clipped from magazine photographs, from there back to modernist-design morphemes, and ultimately to origins in more general “architectural gestures,” in the end his works are not mere lessons in the genealogy of form. The sculptures, while provoking architectural associations, are handmade and deliberately permissive of irregularity, a quality also encouraged by the frothy, undulating glazes developed for their surfaces. East is clearly willing to relinquish precision in favor of epiphanies. “It’s all as un-techy as possible,” he explains. “I cut shapes out of slabs, explore them, and see what happens to them as they build up over time. I pull from architectural iconography, things like the arch that starts to become more like the details on a house from the early 20th century: those references driven by an interest in the mystery and technology behind the desire to span two walls. My original intention with the screens was to make things more transparent, to make the whole process very open. Despite that, there’s something elusive that happens through the combination of these simple gestures. There’s something about extricating a form from an architectural space that’s endlessly interesting to me. It changes the way you look at things. Is someone taking this out of its context? How does it function anymore? It still seems familiar, but suddenly you’re not sure.”
the author Glen R. Brown is a professor of art history at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas.
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