Tony Eastman

Clifton Pre's first "Artist in Residence" was Amanda Price. She came in 1991 as a mask maker, carnival costume and theatre designer. Her many travels to places like the West Indies and Africa fed and inspired her work, and she was able to communicate the excitement she felt through her work with the children. They consequently produced a marvellous array of colourful and creative pieces, that fully reflected the quality of her teaching. I commented at the time, that the opportunity to invite artists in to schools was rare. This year Tony Eastman has been our sixth artist! Like Amanda, he draws much inspiration from his travels, and in 1994 he travelled to Hijikawa in Japan, to take up a three month residency making large scale sculpture with the locals.

He is very committed to Japanese arts and culture and is struck by the way that every day objects like feathers, twigs, shells, cones, pebbles, leaves etc. can be considered as objects of great beauty.

Whilst other themes emerged from the children's work, it was the aim of Tony's residency to encourage greater awareness and appreciation for these natural forms. Isolating and framing, presenting on a pedestal or plaque, standing freely or hanging on a wall, transformed commonplace things into objects of great significance and crucially altered the children's perceptions. These commonplace objects now invite close scrutiny, and the designs and working methods embodied in the pieces reflect the amount of learning involved.

During the course of his residency he brought in many objects, books and photographs from his own enormous collection, and demonstrated an aspect of the creative process, which is the generation and storage of ideas for later use and development through sketchbooks and journals.