Daniel Eatock
Artist Statement for IASPIS
Using my background knowledge from working as a graphic designer, I employ a rational, logical and pragmatic approach when making work. I have an ongoing interest to proposing and finding solutions to problems, often problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved, the shaping of the question is part of the answer. I look for things to fix or improve, working like a tinkerer/inventor, I propose alternatives to existing models, preferring to find ways around doing things properly, bypassing the struggle. I use self referentiality as an objective guide to reduce the extraneous and subjective, and strive for a conceptual logic. The idea is paramount and the material form secondary. My website is a tool where I both create works, and index and exhibit projects chronologically. I propose systems, templates, invitations and opportunities for collaboration, creating social networks where contributers shape the outcome and participate in the building of works. I embrace contradictions, and dilemmas. I like gray areas, oxymorons and the feeling of falling backwards. My favorite colour is the purple found in a soap bubble. I prefer to swap and exchange things rather than use money. I seek alignments, paradoxes, chance circumstance, loops, impossibilities and wit encountered in everyday life. I often change my mind, go full circle, and arrive at the beginning.
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London-based artist Daniel Eatock (born 1975) has a practice shaped by discovery, invention, and an alert sensitivity to coincidence and contradiction. Projects such as a set of dances to accompany car alarms, an open call for snapshots depicting camera straps that resemble photo accidents, and a wiki that invites participants to add the lengths of their favorite vertical structures to a mile-long website scroll, all employ wry humor and reductive, serial logic to reorient our methods for making sense of the world.
A graduate of London’s Royal College of Art, Eatock served on the design staff of the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, Minnesota) before returning to England to work with clients that include Channel Four Television and the Serpentine Gallery. His early regard for conceptual art (cultivated, in part, by his reading of Lucy Lippard’s 1973 classic Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object) has consistently biased his solutions toward the objective, the essential, and the critical without sacrificing the wit that characterizes some of the best examples within this tradition.
Eatock’s hybrid practice is unified by a generous abundance of examples and its openness to collaboration, both of which are demonstrated by the number and variety of projects posted on his website. Driven by ideas and the fluidity of language and its categories, the works are equally invested in a curiosity about the physical properties of objects and materials and the range of circumstances in which we might encounter them. Unforeseen solutions to familiar challenges (domestic storage and display, stationery, website design) join an expanding roster of more idiosyncratic, client-less efforts, such as Eatock’s ongoing attempts to draw a perfect freehand circle, sustain a helium balloon at a constant height, or carry carry a glass of seawater from the ocean to his bedside. These and other projects offer contingent forms of value and meaning amidst the chaos of the everyday.
In 2008 Princeton Architectural Press published Eatock’s monograph Imprint. This 224-page book, the first to survey Eatock’s practice to date, features nearly 1000 images from over one hundred projects from 1994 to the present. Entirely authored and designed by Eatock, the book is distinguished not only by its (deceptive) lack of apparent order but also by the fact that each individual copy in the run of 4,000 is unique. In addition to inking his own thumbprint onto the spine of every book, Eatock arranged for one of his freehand circle drawings (inscribed on a sheet of yellow A4 paper) to be inserted into the binding of each copy at random locations throughout the entire edition.
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Manifesto
Begin with ideas
Embrace chance
Celebrate coincidence
Ad-lib and make things up
Eliminate superfluous elements
Subvert expectation
Make something difficult look easy
Be first or last
Believe complex ideas can produce simple things
Trust the process
Allow concepts to determine form
Reduce material and production to their essence
Sustain the integrity of an idea
Propose honesty as a solution
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Daniel Eatock
7 Minerva Street
London
E2 9EH
United Kingdom
daniel (at) eatock (dot) com
© 2009 Daniel Eatock. All rights reserved.
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