Daniel Eatock

Hand Drawn Circles
pencil on copier paper

I hand drew five hundred circles on A3 sheets. I removed the most accurate one from the stack and framed it, leaving the other 499 sheets as a stack on the floor.

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The hand-drawn circle has a powerful place in Eatock’s practice as a conceptual and performative template. It is diagram of circular thinking, a sign of the loop, a physical link connecting beginnings and ends, etc. Drawing a circle by hand is also a challenge that measures skill and the idea of measurement itself. Who has drawn a perfect free-hand circle and how do we judge it to be so?

During the course of his career, Eatock estimates that he has drawn over 10,000 circles with pencil on letter-size paper, some much better than others. We know for certain that he has executed at least 4,000 examples of these drawings (on yellow sheets) because one was bound into every copy of his 2008 book Imprint (each positioned at a different place in the book.) Richard Torchia