Hanging in the entrance to the London Mithraeum Bloomberg Space, the words “Tell Mum You Love Her” are inscribed on the wings of an eponymous sculpture—depicting a hybrid of butterfly and human. Crafted from burlap, felt, cotton, and ceramic, as well as dance shoes once belonging to the artist’s mother, the work, and its pithy reminder to pick up the phone and call Mom, foretells the conceptual framework around which Jonathan Baldock’s exhibition “0.1%” is conceived.

At its center stands Mother, 2025. Nearly four meters tall, the goddess-like figure dons a head that is the bronze enlargement of a clay sculpture that Baldock made for his mother as a child. Housed in the museum that is also home to the Temple of Mithras—an all-male ancient Roman worship space whose excavated remains were discovered in London and are now installed there—she stands as a powerful counterbalance to women’s exclusion. Echoing the exhibition’s title, which references the minimal genetic difference that separates one human from another, she also serves as a potent reminder of how deeply related we all are as humans.

Organized within a structure of tree branches and the ropes stretched between them, which act as a symbol of interconnectedness, the show unfolds as a fascinating interplay between folkloric forms and contemporary aesthetics: Image panels with hand-sewn symbols (love grows deeper, 2024, and Chosen Family, 2025), soft fabric sculptures like Bluebell (i), 2024, and ceramic vessels in gender-fluid forms with instructive titles like Take only what you need or Use all that you take, both 2024, create realms deeply rooted in universal cultural rituals often led by women and their transformation. As one leaves the exhibition space, having the unifying power of female practices and customs in mind, the moment finally arrives: “Mom, hey, how are you?”

A glorious spell of sunshine has swept across the UK of late, fast-tracking the transition from winter via spring and straight into what feels like summer already. The natural world has roared out of hibernation. Eggs have hatched. Trees are in full bloom. There could be no better elemental backdrop for the arrival of artist Jonathan Baldock’s latest commission, recently unveiled in the Ballroom Gallery at Jupiter Artland, on the verdant outskirts of Edinburgh. WYRD is a coven of magical creatures, handmade by Baldock in textile and clay, standing together in pairs in a semi-circle that feels simultaneously protective and conspiratorial. Visitors join the silent group, and there’s an uncanny sense that it is we, not they, who are being observed.

The species in question are each scientifically proven to have same-sex interactions, and relationships even: giraffes, lizards, horses, cats, mice, chickens. Indeed, the premise of the show was born from a news story about a bond between two male penguins at Edinburgh Zoo. Baldock was first intrigued and then dismayed by the nature of the reporting, which suggested the reason these two male penguins were in a relationship was because there was a shortage of female penguins. The tone of the coverage was mawkish, with a sinister undertone in certain places of homophobic bias. It stirred something in Baldock, who had a religious upbringing and is himself gay. The penguins’ behaviour was deemed weird and unnatural, feelings any queer person can relate to in their own awakening.

‘WYRD’, the title of Baldock’s show, has a palimpsest quality to it. ‘In pre-Christian culture, “wyrd” was personified as a Goddess with the power to determine destiny across earthly and spiritual realms,’ Baldock writes in the exhibition’s opening text. Wyrd is an Old Norse word meaning ‘exceptional otherness’. The word has accrued different insinuations over time: magical, dangerous, strange, unnatural, aberrant – arriving today as a slur, more than a complement. Baldock himself has been described as weird, and titling his show with the word’s Old Norse origin is, he explains, a reclamation of its more wonderful and wonder-filled definition.

‘I’ve made these creatures more magical than they ordinarily are,’ Baldock explained at the show’s opening. ‘I’ve played with their scales, and given them new features – hands, noses, ears, faces – cast in ceramic from myself and my partner (the artist Rafal Zajko). They are beautifully monstrous; from a queer perspective, we identify with monsters, rule-breakers and creatures outside the perceived norms of society.’ The creatures have a folk energy, and a certain nostalgic aura. They are familiar, more than threatening and Baldock explains how their forms and details were inspired by vintage soft toy ‘how-to books’ from the 1970s and 1980s.

Baldock worked seven days a week for three months making each animal pair by hand in his studio. There’s a strangely visceral, bodily appeal to them – you sense the fact they have been wrestled out of a psyche into physical form. The metamorphic process of humble sackcloth and coconut fibre stuffing becoming works of art gives them a compelling Frankenstein alchemy. Standing in pairs lends the animals a power, but there’s an intentional Noah’s Ark echo too, of course. We’re left unsure whether they are waiting to board or they’ve been denied access to the Ark for their otherness and are deliberating their fate together. There is palpable tension and poignancy here; something meaningful is softly implied, yet left hanging in the air. The mood is heightened by the pristine primness of the decorated Ballroom Gallery in which they wait. You want to hug them and tell them it's not a phase – it’ll be OK.

‘WYRD’ is a magnificent commission and moving experience. Baldock describes the work with poetic and precise allegorical confidence. ‘Having grown up with a religious background, today I look to the natural world for spiritual sustenance,’ he says. ‘My faith is in nature, and nature is queer. Scientific evidence about same-sex behaviour has existed for decades, but has been routinely ignored or buried, and has only surfaced recently. It’s important to see yourself in this world that we live in – naturally.’ Away from the huddle of forms in the room on the mantelpiece sits a nest with an egg on the verge of hatching. ‘It’s a nod to the next generation,’ Baldock explains. And with that, we descend back into the garden with its pollen-filled air, feeling as if we’ve been granted access to something extraordinary – earthly, primal, animal and spiritual – wyrd in the most wonderful possible way.

‘WYRD’, Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh. From 10 May - 28 September 2025

For all that the high-rise City of London is a densely-packed architectural testament to the modern age, there are within it glimpses of the world that went before. The street-level experience and globally-recognised skyline is a jigsaw of towers by the likes of Richard Rogers, Rafael Viñoly, Kohn Pedersen Fox and more but underneath and between there are glimpses of pre-war, medieval, and more distant pasts that have all led to the financial centre that exists today. A prominent example of this layering of the city can be found underneath the £1bn European HQ of Bloomberg, the Norman Foster-designed immaculately hewn compact block of a building that’s bisected by a public route following the long-buried Walbrook River, gesturally brought to the surface with Cristina Iglesias’ Forgotten Streams fountain sculptures.

While the 10-storeys above are the epitome of 21st century engineering and polished architecture where thousands daily worship at the altar of high finance and the miraculous invisible hand of the market (the Bloomberg HQ was used as location for the recent HBO/BBC finance debauchery-drama Industry), the basement reveals the roots of it all through the remains of the Roman Temple of Mithras, directly connecting the London of today to the city of 1800 years ago.

There is little remaining, however, of the landscape before the settlement of Romans, before Londonium existed when the landscapes were continuous with those of modern-day Surrey, Essex, Sussex, and Kent. Some of that rural landscape and customs have been transplanted into the Bloomberg SPACE gallery as an act of introducing counter-myths to those of Mithras, below. Artist Jonathan Baldock has created an installation titled 0.1%, comprising textiles, clay sculptures, and an architectural framework filling the space.

At the centre of it all is a towering figure, a feminine anti-Mithras to bring a new energy into the space to work against the legacy of the Mithras cult and the idea of a warrior-hero. Temples of Mithreas, Mithraeum, were sunken, below ground, and represented the cave to which Mithras carried then killed the primordial bull in the cult’s creation myth. A chamber of fourteen columns forming seven sequential grades of the cult, the temple would have been visited by male members from the army, mercantile class, and civil servants as a space of bonding and ritual.

Above, Baldock has created a different architecture, one not based on structured patriarchal progression but one formed on a more open, fluid mode of navigation, and which at the centre features a goddess based upon the artist’s own mother. “When I was about five or six, I made a clay sculpture of my mum,” the artist says, “well, it was Kentish mud, which is very clay based, it was very small – it fits in the palm of your hand – and I had completely forgotten about it but my mum keeps things, and she pulled this out … it was 40 years since I'd seen it, but I remember making it.”

The artist’s oversized flowers at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, address ideas of inheritance and nurture 

Spring has come early in Jonathan Baldock’s solo show, ‘we are flowers of one garden’, at Stephen Friedman. On the walls of the exhibition space, outsized blooms flourish, their sackcloth petals spoking from brightly glazed ceramic discs, their stuffed-linen root systems trailing across the black floor, as though they’ve been pulled up by some huge, unseen hand. These plants belong to no species known to botany. Indeed, their generative pistils and stamen have been replaced by, or perhaps mutated into, human countenances, cast from the faces of the British artist and his septuagenarian mother – a woman who taught him many of the craft techniques he employs in his work, and who has long cultivated her own modest garden in the village where Baldock spent his formative years. 

This, then, is an exhibition about roots, nurturing and budding into (creative) flower, in which sculptures formed from clay and textiles emphasize their origins as earth and vegetable matter. Nevertheless, it is neither a wholly bucolic vision nor a straightforwardly autobiographical exercise. In the exhibition text, the artist says that he’d like his anthropomorphized flora ‘to look like they could perhaps eat you’, and in Wildflowers don’t care where they grow (all works 2022), there’s a whiff of both the cursed mandrake root and the walking carnivorous plants from John Wyndham’s post-apocalyptic novel The Day of the Triffids (1951). Here, Baldock’s features emerge grimacing from the centre of a yolky yellow bloom, his mouth stuffed with dried chamomile, as though to calm him from some terrible, hungry rage. On a different, albeit no less disquieting note, in And I refused to just wither in place, a long pink ceramic tongue spools from his mother’s mouth, while her face is framed by what look less like petals than glossy scarlet labia. Growth may be one phase of organic existence, but it is bracketed by sex and death – two things which Baldock’s flowers, with their unsettlingly mobile root systems, appear all-too ready to provide. 

The cycle of life is as close to an eternal theme as it gets, and to make it feel fresh is no small challenge. The artist’s witty formal invention certainly helps. Consider They were common and close, I had no room for growth, a white stoneware vessel with a pregnant belly that sprouts a pair of cast hands and feet expressing contrary, if connected, emotional states: the former an exuberant ‘jazz hands’ gesture, the latter toe-curling embarrassment (which extremities belong to son, and which to mother, is left deliciously unclear). Another factor is how Baldock’s identity as a gay man scrambles any dully heteronormative readings of these works’ dynamics, familial or otherwise. Much as this exhibition is preoccupied with what we inherit, and bequeath, through nature and nurture, it also has more universal concerns. While the show’s titular ‘garden’ is, in one sense, the self, in another, it’s our wide, shared world. 

If this world has a deity, then perhaps it’s Mother Flower: a totemic, stuffed-fabric bloom whose pink face is tattooed with green floral motifs borrowed from European folk art. In the gallery where she hangs, the sound work Just a wild rambling rose seeking mysteries untold (a collaboration with Luke Barton) swells from a set of speakers. Amid amniotic throbs, mother and son sing Dolly Parton’s track ‘Wildflowers’ (1987), and Baldock’s late grandfather plays the accordion. Looking closer at Mother Flower, we might notice she’s chewing on a mouthful of dried roses, consuming dusty, bitter petals as she breathes out sweet perfume. Maybe her divine wisdom is that we should focus on cultivating our garden and leave the imponderable questions of life and death, the ‘mysteries untold’, to her.

Any artist worth their salt spends their career striving to achieve a visual language all their own. It is a statement that sounds so obvious as to be meaningless, but is far easier said than achieved; the line between a contemporary artwork that’s in productive dialogue with past and present practices and one that’s just plain derivative and/or irrelevant is incredibly fine, and tricky to tread. Every artistic practice references, but with varying degrees of subtlety, rigor, and success. Whether through pure imitation, parody, pastiche, or refined homage, all artists engage in a dialogue with art history and with their peers, whether they want to fully acknowledge that or not.

In his current show at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, British artist Jonathan Baldock offers a masterclass in navigating this difficult creative terrain. The work here quotes liberally from a broad stable of references and influences, from Bauhaus theater and early Renaissance painting to northern European folklore and 70s pop songs. His range of techniques and processes are just as catholic—Baldock turns his hand to appliqué, tapestry, ceramics, and weaving. In the hands of a less capable artist, it could all very easily become a blurry, art historical hodgepodge. However, thanks to the artist’s deft sensitivity to vernacular histories of craft, folklore, theater and ritual, his technical prowess, and, crucially, his dark, infectious sense of humor, this heady mix of references becomes engaging rather than overbearing.

Two large, neatly hand-stitched wall hangings greet us first. Made from hessian and cotton candy-toned felt, Seasons in the Sun and In Your Face (both 2022) unabashedly reference early Renaissance painting with their millefleur-inspired flowers and compositions inspired by a frieze and an altarpiece. In a defiantly contemporary flourish, mouthless heads and ceramic hands seem to be trying to burst forth from their two-dimensional dwellings, hinting at sensuality, even fetishism. Baldock’s longstanding interest in the revolutionary aesthetic of Bauhaus theater (think bright, geometric costumes chock-full of colorful symbolism) exerts a loud presence, too. His titles are also mined from his intricate palette of cultural references: Seasons in the Sun taken from the 1973 Terry Jacks song about a dying man bidding farewell to his loved ones, written with Jacks’s terminally ill best friend in mind. It’s a peppy but profound tune, a latent reference to death and grief in pop form that neatly encapsulates Baldock’s visceral yet culturally attuned approach to death and the rituals that surround it.

As is to be expected from a show entitled Grave Goods, death and dying provide the whole show with its conceptual backbone. Smaller wall pieces—squashed ceramic faces, feet, fingers tied to hessian backdrops, are entitled “Reliquaries,” as in containers for holy relics. His nine stoneware vessels are also fleshy, carnal, with the cast ceramic hands, feet and digits that poke out of them adding yet more corporeality. They’re colorful as hell, from the cobalt blue foot hanging from Boo-Boo to the deep crimson red of Unfurl (both 2022), which has something of the squashed internal organ about it. It’s all extremely icky but also kind of lickable. Each of these vessels and reliquaries also contains funereal herbs—rosemary, lavender, wormwood, mugwort, lemon balm—bringing an olfactory experience to the work. These had largely faded by the time I visited a couple of weeks after the show opened, though that wasn’t as disappointing as you might imagine. The very act of sticking your freshly unmasked nose into a voluptuous piece of stoneware to try to catch a whiff of yarrow flower forces you to relate to it in a startlingly intimate way.

Traces of the artist’s hand and, for that matter his body, are everywhere: one of the sculptures has been brushed with what we assume are three of Baldock’s fingers, while many of the cast body parts, from tongues and ears to feet and fingers, are his own. This all lends a genuine intimacy to the work; nothing like a cast form of an artist’s own big toe or a squelched, ceramic version of his face to encourage an affinity between artwork and viewer. The sheer range of visual references further builds this sense of familiarity, given that there’s something here for so many of us to connect with; Bauhaus aficionados are likely to feel drawn to Baldock’s use of bold symbolism, his depictions of some of the ickier parts of the human form will presumably fascinate anyone with an interest in anatomy, and those with a love of craft will assumedly be engaged by the quality and breadth of his craftsmanship.

Jonathan Baldock and Emma Hart have been on tour, or at least their three-act ‘Love Life’ exhibition has. Starting as a small but busy show at PEER in London at the end of last year, an expanded ‘Act II’ was at Blackpool’s Grundy Art Gallery over the summer, and the final leg finds them on the UK’s South East coast. The locations are significant: ‘Love Life’ takes its cue from the puppet show, Punch and Judy, which can trace its roots in the UK to 17th-century London. In the 20th century, the show’s red-and-white-striped booths became a seaside holiday staple, Punch’s frequently violent relationship with Judy becoming a benchmark of summertime family entertainment. But while ‘Love Life’ references the tropes of the show–De La Warr Pavilion’s back wall is painted in vertical red and white stripes, the artists wear Punch-style large noses in a short film–it is contemporary domestic tensions that are being explored here rather than the puppet show itself.

The scene is set with a decorative hessian hanging depicting a twee-looking house with crosshatched windows (Baldock, Wait Until I Get You Home,  2016). At PEER, this faced the gallery’s floor-to-ceiling front window; in Bexhill-on-Sea, where the first-floor exhibition space is open on one side, it faces onto the interior landing of this seafront pavilion. Peeking out from under the hanging is a garish pink carpet; to the left there’s one of four booth-like interiors that resemble sparsely furnished stage sets. Dyed-red clothes tumble out of a washing machine made from pink metal tubing (Baldock, Out Damn’d Spot!) and works in ceramic and fabric are positioned on the floor, the walls, a dining table. A giant figure in a baby walker – Baldock’s A Guiding Hand–acts as a slightly sinister overseer, its large pink fabric head featuring a film of a single blinking eye. Behind it on the wall, Hart’s ceramic Boohoo Boob Tube features two squeezed paint tubes morphing into red-raw breasts. Spelt out in alphabet spaghetti in a ceramic saucepan are the words: ‘I feel like I’m drowning’ (Baldock, It’s Not Burnt It’s Caramelised). This is no ‘Home Sweet Home’, then; cartoonish and tense, it’s a place to escape from, rather than to.

The tension is ramped up further in the film, Love Life (2017), one of two pieces in the exhibition produced collaboratively, the other being Jon and Emma, a sound installation based on a 1951 Stan Freberg comedy skit. Viewed from a red velvet sofa and presented on a large wall-mounted television, Love Life’s portrayal of domestic drudgery and disquiet provides a narrative that links the exhibition’s disparate elements. In a series of simmering conflicts that border on the slapstick, the domestic life of a couple with a young baby plays out, at turns funny, farcical, and displaying a pettiness that anyone who has ever had an argument with their partner will surely recognize. Feet are intentionally trodden on as they pass on the stairs; doors rhythmically slam; a crammed washing machine whirrs naggingly. The pair don’t talk and barely look at each other, their only communication being via occasional messages written on cardboard: ‘You ****ing loser’ says one; ‘A*?*hole’ another.

‘Love Life’ offers an uncompromising portrayal of a couple living together, exploring both the internal pressures exerted on a relationship and the external expectations that come with family life. Yet while it captures the monotony and frustration of the everyday, it is sustained by both its humour and an almost self-deprecating shrugging of the shoulders. As it examines the stresses and problems of the domestic sphere, it also acts as a reminder that, despite all it can throw at us, equipped with an ‘if you don’t laugh you’ll cry’ stoicism, it is still possible to–yes–‘love life’.

“Love Life: Act 1,” Jonathan Baldock and Emma Hart’s new commission for PEER in conjunction with Grundy Art Gallery and the De La Warr Pavilion, will play out in three parts, the first beginning here. For this exhibition, the artists have refashioned the gallery as a surreal Punch-and-Judy set littered with bizarre handcrafted objects. The two conjoined rooms of the candy-striped space become a gigantic theater for Mr. Punch’s family to perform their cheerfully violent hijinks. Everything is suffused with an air of menace, as though Punch could pop out at any time and brutally beat you with his stick.

In the first room, Baldock has constructed a baby’s high chair out of sickly pink felt and thin metal rods (A Guiding Hand, all works 2016). In the chair sits a grotesque stuffed head, perhaps a child’s, carrying a digital screen that displays a single eye. The eye just stares, occasionally blinking and tearing up, as though it’s witnessed something terrible. On a nearby wall is Hart’s ceramic breasts with bright-red nipples, which seem to have been squeezed to resemble used-up tubes of toothpaste (BooHoo Boob Tube). Jon and Emma is a collaborative recording of the artists shrieking out each other’s names hysterically, orgasmically–a sound track for their sexually aggressive tableau. In the adjoining room, Hart’s trio of ceramic comic-book speech bubbles protrudes from a wall, their silhouettes imitating the aquiline profile of Punch (“You two-faced lying motherfucker”). Their texts yell out phrases such as “the way you use a knife” and “cross your legs”–evoking a feeling not too unlike like that of being trapped in the crossfire of a lovers’ quarrel. Through black humor and innuendo, Hart and Baldock create an engrossingly sad tale where the viewer can decide the finale.

Approaching PEER you can’t miss the large eyes that welcome visitors to Jonathan Baldock & Emma Hart’s Love Life: Act 1, a touring exhibition in three acts that engages with the histories and traditions of Punch and Judy shows. Originally inspired by Italian Commedia dell’Arte, this popular puppet theatre appeared in England in the 17th century and became a familiar feature of street and seaside life from the 19th century onwards. They remained a prominent part of British seaside entertainment throughout the 20th century and marked the childhood experiences of Baldock and Hart.

Basing their collaboration around the domestic drama of Punch and Judy brings a rich and magical world of childhood pleasure to this work, but also the senseless and maniacal violence which features in so much of what children are encouraged to laugh and cheer about.

The series of works presented at PEER are homogenous and repetitious in presentation, making the viewer wonder who has authored which, or where one ends and another begins. Fittingly, this is not the first time the two artists have worked together. In 2015, at l’étrangère gallery, they staged a fictional dinner party that gathered their common interests: the grotesque and the surreal; the domestic and the handmade; the human and its excesses; the peculiar relation between violence and humour. For PEER the Punch and Judy-themed show seems a perfect platform through which to explore these themes, especially the dramatic tipping points that force everyday situations into moments of violent excess.

The space we enter is pervaded by a certain tension, created by a giant one-eyed baby in a baby walker, recalling the monstrous infants of popular horror film or the classical tradition of Polyphemus. The walls are unevenly striped in the red and white of a seaside sideshow, contributing to the deranged sense of a haunted house the owners have abandoned. Ceramic ‘nagging’ feet with black socks are lined up around the edges of the room and are joined by a pair of breasts that, as if squeezed from tubes, hang from the wall. In the background, the artists have recorded a version of Stan Freberg’s 1951 parody, John and Marsha. Their riff on this classic comedy–Jon and Emma (2016)–is rich in melodrama to show how every human emotion can be incorporated into domestic life.

In the next gallery, a baby in a huge ceramic locket ball and chain makes a strong statement on conflicting ideals of parental duty, while also invoking the casual kind of ‘care’ that babies receive in traditional Punch and Judy sketches. It is in this room where reference to the domestic intensifies with a diversity of objects: a washing machine on the floor that is ejecting blood red clothes; the cast fragment of a door implying further scenes of violence; a stove cooking human bodily parts; anthropomorphic speech bubbles on the walls suggest verbal arguments. Familiar objects accumulate and become estranged. We don’t have characters but sculptures with a dramatic charge of agency. Baldock and Hart’s work is deeply performative in this respect, where artworks stage their own theatrical experience and suggest a series of actions that do not necessarily depend on a viewer’s imaginative agency.

Philosopher Bruno Latour has written about the radical aesthetic and experiential shifts that occur when objects are ascribed independent action. Indeed, Baldock and Hart seem to believe that objects and their materiality can be more than creative, more than merely active, but a force for overwhelming destruction. Love Life: Act 1 is a set of a past performance, a balanced account of domestic tragedy staged with unsettling humour and force. And, like the ever-present and often repeated puppet shows that are its inspiration, there are three acts to this play. That’s the way they do it! So we will be richly rewarded by watching their Love Life develop at other places of seaside surrealism, first at Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool next summer, and then at De La Warr Pavillion in Bexhill-on-Sea next autumn.

Male and female, hard and soft, alien and familiar, comfort and danger, abstract and figurative, art and craft, magic and myth, fun and fetish–all possible word pairings that might come to mind when thinking about Jonathan Baldock’s work. This exhibition of new sculptures and wall pieces (all works but one, 2014), constructed using combinations of candy-coloured fabric, print, paint, ceramics, wood and modelling clay, can box-tick them all. The literal ‘orifices’ of the show’s title take the form of holes. They manifest as peepholes in the freestanding padded, patchwork-felted wall, Peephole-wall, that fills the gallery’s floor-to-ceiling window space, and through which one can view the show from the street and vice versa. Among them is the hole at the centre of the giant doughnut-shaped sculpture, Philomena, which perches on three spindly lilac-coloured wooden legs. And there are the small round holes neatly edged in embroidery thread that are cut out of a pattern-printed muslin curtain dividing the back of the gallery from the front and that also appear in hessian wall works presented on stretchers like paintings. One of these, Peach with Feet, is of human proportions and leans against the wall, pink plaster feet protruding from underneath, embodying the idea not just of holes, but of a series of glory holes.

The exhibition’s title is taken from academic Robin Lydenberg’s 1985 essay on the materiality of language and the body in William Burroughs’s counterculture novel Naked Lunch (1959). Baldock’s soft sculptural aesthetic and pastel palette may initially seem far away from the harder, seedier, more bodily subject matter of Burroughs, but there’s enough ambiguity in these works to allow not only the corporeal element but also the sinister and the sexual and the violent to seep through. Take the two small felt sculptures, Form with Protrusions, that not only stand on legs in the shape of large nails but have nails bashed into them like totems or torture implements. Then there’s the pair of club-shaped felt sculptures suspended from the ceiling on rope. They don’t exactly scream out ‘severed heads’, but considered with their title, Atlanta’s Lovers, and with Atlanta being the virgin huntress from Greek mythology who beheaded a procession of unsuccessful suitors who failed to beat her in a running race, severed heads is exactly what they are.

Perhaps the human-scale, masked grey and pink knitted figure slumped in the corner exuding kapok stuffing, The Guide, is Atlanta herself. The fleet-of-foot huntress was said to have worn armour to give her suitors a sporting chance. The thick strips of jersey fabric used to knit this figure create an effect not dissimilar to chain-mail. During Frieze London week, the unstuffed figure was worn by artist Florence Peake for a series of performances. It isn’t hard to imagine that she might still be in there.

Walking through The Soft Machine is more of a journey into the mind than a journey through a gallery. The exhibition functions as a single work of art, which loosely follows the narrative of the novel of the same name by William S. Burroughs. The title itself is a reference to Burroughs’ view of the human form as simultaneously (and perhaps paradoxically) part natural and part artificial, and this is poignantly expressed by the sculpted forms throughout the exhibition. Baldock uses these natural materials to create distinctly unnatural forms, which he uses to begin an intriguing discussion about perceptions of our bodies.

The primary textures selected by Baldock are natural fibres, such as cotton and wool, threaded with oversized needles that function as a nod to Burroughs’ morphine addiction. Wood, carved and glazed to represent faecal matter, squats brazenly in a corner. A glass ball in the centre of a pile of red sand evokes a bloodshot eye. Baldock’s ability to utilise natural forms to invoke surreal imagery is nothing short of masterful. But it is the childish, joyful colour choices of Baldock that most intrigued me.The palette is incredibly rich, comprised primarily of vibrant yellows and oranges, clashing boldly with deep blues and browns. Colours are presented typically in block or patchwork form, adding to the childlike quality of the sculptures.The individual sculptures themselves are somewhat reminiscent of M. C. Escher’s paradoxical architecture; individual aspects of Baldock’s sculptures depict parts of the human body in a realistic and insightful way, but when seen as part of a larger whole, they only serve to confuse and disorientate the viewer. One can clearly see a nose, and then try to force oneself to see a face where a face simply does not exist. A human form looms imposingly in the corner of the eye, but upon facing the sculpture, it is merely a fuzzy, woollen caricature of a person’s silhouette, with too many limbs and no facial features.

It is their near-human form that is the most unsettling thing about the exhibition. Whilst not invoking any real, personal sense of horror, the human-esque forms that Baldock creates certainly have a nightmarish quality. Despite the fact that the gallery itself is actually a relatively open, well-lit space, it nonetheless felt claustrophobic. The ability of these inanimate objects to communicate is likely due to their respective proximity to each other, which certainly makes one highly apprehensive when moving through the exhibition, being careful not to step on or bump into any of the pieces. This newfound self-awareness of one’s body as a physical object–the space that it occupies, and how it interacts with its environmen–entrenches and reaffirms Baldock’s notion of the human form as a Soft Machine. It reminds me of the humorous notion of the brain as the overprotective owner of a meaty vehicle.

The Soft Machine also contains a set of cumbersome, oversized costumes with cartoon-like faces woven into the fabric. The first parallel I drew was how Baldock’s use of artificial media to convey natural forms mirrors the way in which humans use fabric and clothing to convey their personality. But there is also a deeper artistic meaning here; a homage to Oskar Schlemmer’s 1922 Triadisches Ballet, in which the designer created costumes that enlarged and emphasised aspects of the body in an attempt to transcend the traditional human form. The costumes are deliberately difficult to wear, which Baldock uses to represent the fact that, at some point, everyone feels uneasy in their own skin.

But the piece most closely linked to the theme of transcendence is that of a large blue felt cuboid held aloft by four brightly-coloured wooden stilts. It stands imposingly at the entrance to the third andfinal room, which represents the final chapter of The Soft Machine. Resting gently atop the felt is a mass of cotton wool, crafted into a stunningly realistic cloud formation. The placement of the cloud, which is not easily visible due to its height, likely represents the age-old, primordial desire for humans to reach the clouds. Furthermore, its deliberate placement directly over the doorway is clearly part of Baldock’s repeated desire to force the viewer into close proximity with the art; to engage with it whilst also reflecting on our own bodies.

The ultimate effect of the exhibition is to serve as a challenge to our experiences of our own bodies, how we represent them, and how they interact with our environment. Baldock makes art appear to be the most natural, instinctive way that our bodies can interact with their environment. The result is captivating.

There is a notable legacy of discussion pertaining to the fact that a piece of art may or may not display the hand of its maker or the process of its production. As with any aesthetic circumstance manifest in the exhibition of contemporary art, this can be an element of the conscious conceptual thesis of the work of art, and thus of the artist, or equally it can be irrelevant and incidental.

It is this finite instance of craft and touch passing osmotically through the artistic membrane to its audience that Jonathan Baldock’s work brings to the fore. It is exactly this relationship between the artist’s hand and the audience’s eye that Baldock abstracts so purposefully in the production of his heartily manufactured sculptural installations. The most recent of these, A strange cross between a butcher’s shop and a nightclub, is the product of Baldock’s six-week residency at Wysing Arts Centre, the art farm metropolis of the East Anglian countryside. The residency, which Baldock undertook in October and November of 2012, was the third in a series of thematised residencies, Baldock’s being concerned with the notion of the forest, the previous two being themed around the Cosmos and the Mirror, respectively.

The process by which Baldock produces his patchwork monoliths involves, roughly, the sewing of felt patches of varying sizes, shapes and colours together over carved pieces of polystyrene. The resulting shapes could easily go unnoticed as imposters on the set of a children’s television programme, or equally in a sensory development installation in a pediatric ward’s recreation facility. The sculptures, while they are absolutely faultless in their mismatched, handcrafted imperfection, have an unusual posture for objects of their class, holding themselves differently to the way that abstract sculpture might usually in the gallery space. These works seems to bulge, swell and pulsate with the trace of Baldock’s hand. The swerving seams that traverse the sculpture’s surfaces, although carrying the appearance of a tailor’s work, are so meandering and unconventional that they seem fit to burst. They invite the gaze, but not in a sacred, seductive way; instead they exude a tactility that reassures the viewer that to touch would be fair, and understandable, if not entirely appropriate. In essence, these works immediately betray their desire to be touched, handled and used, yet they seem completely devoid of purpose. They are the sort of blissfully innocent creations a child might create, were a child capable of such exquisite craft. Yet simultaneously Baldock’s installations carry an overflowing baggage of referential intelligence, with references to folk art, paganism, the theatrical canon and even more specific cultural nodes such as Samuel Beckett’s televised work Quad, 1981, which features heavily in the show’s accompanying text.

The works, which are arranged around Wysing’s gallery space in small groups or sets, are encountered intermittently by the viewer, who bounces around the room, from one arrangement to the next. Each set of sculptures and props stands completely autonomously, and is titled as such, despite each comprising multiple objects of varying sizes and materials. However, the body of work as a whole remains coherent due to the adhesive nature of two central elements: firstly, Baldock’s work Wallpaper and instruments, 2013, a large tapestry adorned with ceramic hangings, suspended on the gallery’s back wall, which enacts the role of a theatrical backdrop; and secondly, a low, wide stage that occupies a large section of the gallery’s floor towards the far end of the space. The stage, too, is adorned with objects: small tools which are designed and arranged so as to give every impression that they are born to use, but as clumsily glazed, fragile ceramics ultimately reveal their own uselessness. Similar tools are arranged on or around the felt and polystyrene works throughout and, again, their scale and their hand-crafted appearance invites tactile interaction.

Factor in the masks, both sewn felt and corn-dolly, that bracket the show, appearing on the left and right walls upon entry, and it becomes clear that this is a site of performance and that these objects, while already bordering on kinetic, will eventually come to life, given the opportunity. During Wysing’s annual open weekend, on 6 and 7 July, Baldock’s collaboration with reputable choreographer Henrietta Hale and her collective Dog Kennel Hill project will be realised in a performance whereby the works–or, rather, props–will finally become performative. The stage, at present a sculptural element of the exhibition, will become a site for the activation of these objects; as so far their status as modernist sculptures has been disrupted by the omnipresent nostalgia of the artist’s hand, so a new disruption will occur, bringing these props absolutely and immediately into the present.