Daniel Eatock is a London-based designer known for his conceptual approach to solving traditional client design problems, as well as those of his own choosing. He is fascinated in the connections between image and language, titles, miscommunication, subversions, open systems, seriality, collections, discovery and inventing. Eatock employs a reductive logic to his practice, toying with the paradoxes of function and non-function.
Counter Balance Shelves takes unfashionable DIY shelves, and turns them into a meditation on functionality and composition. A number of standard unit shelves are presented in a neat vertical row, but with just one bracket instead of the customary, and necessary, two. Selected objects from around Arnolfini are used to counterbalance the shelves, providing the sense of precarity and of the psychological relationship between an understanding of gravity and composition.
Book Circle is another modest sculpture that, like Counter Balance Shelves, includes a selection of objects taken from within the Arnolfini. This work consists of a number of publications selected from the shelves of Arnolfini’s bookshop, stood up in a tight circular formation within the exhibition space. The books are selected due to their relevance to the previous development of the exhibition by the curators (Åbäke and Nav Haq), but here are not allowed to be either sold by the bookshop, or be touched or read by visitors.