Daniel Eatock’s multiform career has been defined by a series of high-profile commercial design jobs, together with a vast body of self-instigated works that manifest themselves on multiple, often participatory, platforms including his own website, printed material, exhibitions, and performative actions as part of his day-to-day existence.
Developed over the course of his Stanley Picker Fellowship, Eatock has been preparing an extensive series of proposals for new object-based works that each establishes a range of formal, practical or conceptual conceits connecting two otherwise independently existing objects. Whilst remaining firmly embedded in his wider hybrid practice, these sculptural object-scenarios have also been originated as part of initial developmental research for the re-branding of the national television network BBC2.
One + One presents this extensive new series of staged object-scenarios; Eatock intermittently overseeing the on-site production and documentation of the individual works for the entire 8-week duration of the exhibition. The Stanley Picker Gallery will, at once, play host to an organised archive of original sourced objects as primary material; a specially built ‘infinity-cove’ platform for the staging of the individual works as they are prepared and recorded; and a projected display of the resulting documented outcomes. Gallery visitors will be invited to participate in aspects of the production process; the exhibition content evolving continually as the original objects are employed, and re-employed, in the development of the final works.
Ultimately surviving in their chosen documented form shown both in the gallery and at www.eatock.com, the playful combinations of the objects employed, their various juxtapositions, and the differing durational nature of their new-found pairings (from static to split-second and perpetual motion) generate a set of immediate yet complex interrelationships of form, weight, colour, material, scale, structure, texture, function… by which Eatock attempts to both comprehend and complicate the world around us.
The new One + One works are accompanied by a slideshow of snapshots of found-scenarios taken by Daniel and also received from contributors to his website over the past ten years. The exhibition was co-curated by Daniel Eatock with Gallery Director David Falkner, and informed by a programme of open-meetings with students and staff at the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture. Thank you to all contributors and participants.
Dutch-based design agency Onomatopee published a One + 1 book-edition, based on the Fellowship project and featuring a text by Spike Island Curator Marie-Anne McQuay.