Leslie Eastman

Dr Leslie Eastman is a visual artist and educator with extensive experience in academic teaching, leadership and practice-based creative research.

Eastman joined the program in Interior Design at RMIT in 2020 after having worked as a full-time lecturer for twenty years in the Department of Fine Art at Monash University Art Design and Architecture. Eastman maintains an ongoing innovative installation art practice with research exhibited regularly across public, commercial and artist-run exhibition spaces nationally and internationally. He has received critical acknowledgment and competitive funding from many arts funding bodies.

Eastman's approach to teaching and art making is informed by an interest in philosophy and psychology, as well as his training in Fine Art in Painting at RMIT in the 1990s. Eastman's research activity is focused around theories of phenomenology of perception and innovations in installation practice that are typically site-specific and ephemeral. The projects often involve significant logistical and organizational investment and he regularly works in collaboration with artists and writers in order to question and extend the role of authorship and the limits of an individual practice.

Eastman has worked primarily with site-determined ephemeral installations that explore the human sensorium in many ways for the viewer's completion and contemplation. Through these, he aims to prompt larger revelations about the nature of perception itself. The current practice takes many forms, including drawing, video, optics, sculpture and photography, often utilising architectural installation in a context specific to site. The notion of the boundary between the interior and the exterior is a recurring motif. The various screens, frames and mirrored surfaces are materials used to provoke questions about the apparent demarcation between the real world and the internal world of the viewer. A corollary of these approaches is the idea of the interrelatedness of place and surroundings. Eastman emphasises the sometimes imperceptible relationship between a particular architectural site or landscape and the expanded field of its geographic, cultural or temporal surroundings that constitutes both its uniqueness and interdependence. He has done this through a number of methods, including the camera obscura and streaming technology.