JONATHAN BALDOCK: TOUCH WOOD

The artist in conversation with Sarah Coulson, YSP Senior Curator

SC: Your new textile sculptures for YSP are inspired by three medieval wooden carvings from nearby Wakefield Cathedral. What was it about them that captured your imagination?

JB: To be honest it was hard to choose just three! The wooden quire* at Wakefield Cathedral is full of beautiful carvings that all tell something of the human experience. I decided to focus on the Green Men, a sphinx and a fantastic little misericord* of a person exposing their buttocks. Each is distinct but related. All objects tell stories, but I felt these characters really had a lot to say. As an artist, I imagine how much fun it would have been making them: they are pure in their freedom of expression. As a person from a working-class background, I am connected to how they represent the voice of a regular working person from history and not the voice of authority. As a queer person, I see them as objects that don’t fit within the traditional teachings of Christianity, yet here they are nonetheless. They have survived the reformation, and other repressive ideals and censorship. Despite some tampering (the Victorians placed a fig leaf on the figure exposing their buttocks), for me they tell a story of survival. There is love, humour and joy in these sculptures: essential parts of human existence that I really want to celebrate in the show.

The subject matter is also important to me. Two of the objects depict hybrid beings: the sphinx and the Green Man. These are creatures from the myths, folklore and fairy tales that would have been commonly shared amongst people at the time and that have ancient origins in stories from many cultures across the world. For example, Metamorphoses by Roman poet Ovid (43–17 BCE) is a catalogue of transformations where the boundaries between organisms are fluid and blurred. I am fascinated that today scientific research is making discoveries about how we are actually composite beings as we have microbes and bacteria in our bodies that keep us alive.

SC: Do you relate the hybrid and fluid forms of mythology and folklore to queerness? 

JB: Absolutely. I think they are proof that these ideas have been around for thousands of years, and I believe they allow for a space to be created in which we, as queer people, can see ourselves exist happily. A world without the rules and the binaries that society imposes. The Green Man is a symbol of rebirth and resurrection and as such is in a continual state of transition. I believe that we are all going through this: we all adapt, change and alter. It’s part of being human. Although there is much of the queer experience woven into the work, I believe it’s something we should all be able to identify with on some level. On the textile hangings I’ve sewn the words You Enrich This World – it’s a nod to the last sentence in Shon Faye’s book The Transgender Issue where she writes, “your existence enriches this world”. I thought it was such a powerful and moving statement, and a sentiment I wanted to share.

SC: The seasons and life cycles of the natural world play a central role in your work. Why is a close connection to the land, its rhythms and materials so important to you?

JB: Quite simply I think it’s because I’m getting older, which means I’m experiencing grief and realising the fleetingness of life. I no longer believe in any organised religion, but I do believe in our connection to the earth, and I draw a lot of comfort from that. I live in a city in a very small flat without a balcony and I do feel the absence of nature and I miss it. I’m also aware that nature is not to be overly romanticised as it is a powerful force that can easily destroy us. I think historically people felt their relationship to nature more deeply, and I think it’s something the medieval artists of the little wooden sculptures in Wakefield Cathedral thought about with the creation of their hybrid creatures. I also wanted to make reference to the location of the exhibition, set within the landscape at YSP, especially as this is the first time I’ve had an opportunity to show my work in such beautiful natural surroundings.

SC: Creating an environment that appeals to all the senses is often a big part of your installations. At YSP there is a mural covering the walls and a special scent in the gallery. There is also a sound work. Can you tell me about that and how it relates to the objects and themes of the exhibition?

JB: I feel like sound is a great tool for creating intimacy in the space. Plant Song was created by Luke Barton in response to the works and he has described it as follows: “The sound for the show leans into the same themes and influences as the rest of the work and it looks to nature, folklore and paganism for inspiration. The sound has an unsettling and shapeshifting quality and it aims to underpin and enhance the alternate reality created by the physical work. The sound also moves through the seasons in a direct connection to the four large textile hangings seen in the centre of the space. “The main bed of the sound is derived directly from birdsong and plants recorded in the grounds of YSP. Changes in the electrical conductivity of the plants have been detected by sensors and converted into audio. This audio has then been mapped to the sound of ethereal choir voices singing in monophonic, Gregorian style drones and basic harmony and also abstract organs, both in reference to Wakefield Cathedral, which is a key influence on the rest of the work. On top of this bed are other nods to local culture and folklore. The sampled audio of the Wakefield Morris Dancers can be heard during a celebratory summery moment. And wood chopping has been sampled and manipulated to create a polyrhythm to represent working people, craftsmanship and the decay of autumn into winter.”

SC: Circular symbols feature on the ceramics and the hanging textiles. What do these represent?

JB: These are based on sacred geometry, the study of the repeating shapes and patterns from which all nature is formed. It is rooted in ancient cultures and is often used to symbolise how everything in the world is interconnected. I read a book by Matthew Champion on medieval graffiti and a huge part of it is dedicated to geometric symbols that were scratched into the stonework of many churches around the UK. These personal etchings were likely made by members of the congregation many years ago. There are numerous theories about their purpose and meaning, but I loved that they were created by everyday working people, and I felt a deep connection to that. I was hoping to find some in Wakefield Cathedral, but unfortunately there weren’t any.

SC: The materials and techniques you use feel democratic and linked to generations of makers through traditional trade and craft skills. Can you say something about these connections through time and material?

JB: I’m particularly drawn to processes associated with functionality – the ‘useful’ crafts rooted in the traditions of working people such as the appliqué, ceramic and basketry that the show primarily consists of. This functional aspect is clear with ceramic and basketry, but the appliqué technique that I used to make the textile works is also rooted in these practices. It was developed historically to make use of scraps and remnants of fabric so that nothing was wasted. There are some beautiful medieval examples in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Although it was common, much less of this type of work survives than its more highly valued cousins, such as woven or embroidered textiles. I’ve worked in textile my whole life. I was taught how to sew, knit and crochet as a child by my nan. She – like my mum and many of her generation – was taught these very practical craft skills from a young age. I always think of my own use of these methods of making as a kind of love letter to them.

SC: Your mum’s face and hands feature alongside casts from your own and your partner’s bodies in these works. This also feel like an expression of love.

JB: Well, in a way it is. I wanted to immortalise my mum in the work, and it’s a love letter for all that she has done for me, but it’s also an acknowledgment of her as the person who taught me many of the techniques I use to make my textile pieces. This work recognises the importance of the people that support us in life. I think everyone can identify with that on some level, whether it’s a parent, a partner, or a friend.

SC: That’s a fitting place to end. With love expressed as a creative act. Thank you Jonathan for this joyful and thought-provoking show.

04.10.2023

Interview with Emily Steer for Burlington Contemporary

https://contemporary.burlington.org.uk/articles/articles/jonathan-baldock

The raucous ceramic and textile installations of Jonathan Baldock (b.1980) are replete with emotion, often drawing on the artist’s personal history, as well as mythic and pagan traditions. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2005, his exhibitions have become increasingly ambitious, encompassing sound, scent and towering sculptures. His last solo show, we are flowers of one garden, at Stephen Friedman, London (20th January–25th February 2023), evolved out of the artist’s close relationship with his mother. Large sculptures resembling flowers reference her passion for gardening, alongside wider themes of nature and life cycles. Such sculptures – some of which include casts of his mother’s face – are at once humorous, touching, terrifying, surreal and yet undeniably lifelike.

Baldock’s solo exhibition Touch Wood at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP; 23rd September 2023–7th July 2024) develops similar themes. The double meaning of the title – at once a reference to traditional superstitions and lewd humour – parallels the multi-layered approach of the installation. Here, Baldock’s symbolism originates in the fifteenth-century misericords and carved wooden figures in the nearby Wakefield Cathedral. Misericords are small seats on the undersides of stalls or chairs, designed for monks or canons to rest against for support during long periods of prayer. They are often richly carved with vivid subjects, including mythical beasts, or scenes of everyday life. In this new body of work, Baldock has included casts of his face and body, as well as those of his mother – featuring as part of flower heads or appendages to ceramic vessels. This intensely personal approach is woven through with folk motifs, sacred geometric forms and hybrid creatures. Emily Steer interviewed the artist about this new project and his interest in elements from the past that have often survived in secrecy.

Emily Steer (ES): Touch Wood at Yorkshire Sculpture Park brings together multiple threads – from the personal to historical and local research. What was your starting point?

Jonathan Baldock (JB): I’m a fan of gargoyles and so whenever I go to a new place I check if there are relevant architectural sites worth visiting. Wakefield Cathedral doesn’t have gargoyles, but it does have misericords, which are found underneath the seats in the quire – the section where the clergy and choir sit during prayer. They often show weird hybrid beings that are akin to gargoyles. In Wakefield, there’s one carved with an image of a man bending over and baring his bum, which was really funny to me, and became a central part of the exhibition. There are a lot of scatological references in misericords; there’s also so much joy in them. The imagery isn’t what we would typically consider to be religious today – they are not necessarily connected to the scriptures – but rather more to do with mythical, pagan or folk beings. For me, they speak to the time and people who made them, who I would say were working people. They are beacons of self-expression, and this became the springboard to reimagine a sacred space for Touch Wood. I wanted to bring these small sculptures that have remained somewhat hidden out into the open and make them monumental.

ES: What sort of imagery do you see recur in the misericords, and how did the makers bring their own creativity to them?

JB: You see the Green Man quite a bit, the origins and significance of which in a Christian context are still unclear. For me, from a queer perspective, there’s something important about the misericords existing on the outside and surviving censorship. They survived the Reformation and the conflicts that followed. A leaf was added during the Victorian era to the misericord of the man exposing himself, so it was censored a little, but he’s still there. You can think of it as a silly bit of humour, frivolity and whimsy, but it also speaks to something much more complex. History is not written by working people, so I see these objects as a bridge to the people we don’t know much about.

I grew up around people with religious beliefs, and so I’m very interested in faith but from a distanced position. If you’re gay, you don’t have a place in many religions. But I think about existence and spirituality. Sacred geometry is a recurring motif in this new body of work, which ties into the idea of the never-ending line and interconnectivity of everything. It also relates to nature, which is another major theme in Touch Wood. A lot of these misericords are hybrid versions of animals and nature. There’s a brilliant documentary by Louie Schwartzberg about the mycelium network called Fantastic Fungi (2019) and a book by Merlin Sheldrake titled Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures (2020). These ideas are very ancient, but in a wider, cultural sense, we’re now discovering the extent to which we’re all entangled beings.

ES: There’s been lots of interest in the idea of entanglement recently. In The Milk of Dreams, at the 2022 Venice Biennale, for example, many artists returned to the interconnection between humans, nature and animals. The pandemic and the climate crisis have certainly brought these ideas – which, as you say, aren’t new – into focus as another way of understanding our place in the world.

JB: I grew up around nature and couldn’t wait to get to the big city. I think a lot of queer people have a desire to make that pilgrimage. I’m now in my forties, I don’t have children and people who I care about are dying. There’s a shift in how I’m thinking about why I’m here – it’s a feeling of ‘what’s next?’. In we are flowers of one garden I was aware of my mum not being around for much longer and I wanted to create a show about how important she is to me. But it’s not just a love letter to her and her garden, I was also thinking about my existence, our existence and the purpose of it all. Touch Wood is a continuation of that. I’m finding comfort in learning about the planet and the idea of my body returning to earth and feeding into something else.

ES: In secular cultures, there seems to be a shift in looking for new meanings – ones that connect with ideas of returning to nature rather than heaven or rebirth. We’re also thinking about the future of the planet and the death of the world as we know it.

JB: We’re probably heading for mass extinction, but I think life will continue in a different form. Our existence is so small and insignificant and yet in the West we consider everything in an anthropocentric way. I’m interested in looking at things in a collective manner: organisms make us, we are a universe unto ourselves. I wanted to create a space at YSP that is in parts funny, joyous and meditative. Hopefully it will evoke a feeling similar to what you might experience in a place of worship. A lot of people who don’t follow a religion say that they are still moved by such spaces. I’m attracted to creating that through colour, the handmade and the body.

ES: You also include sound elements in Touch Wood. Your installations have become increasingly sensory – your audiences walk into an environment rather than simply looking at pieces of work.

JB: I love being able to create immersive spaces when I’m given the opportunity. It’s very theatrical. I find a lot of pleasure in the potential for worldbuilding and creating a space to step out of the everyday. The sound has been created by a friend of mine, Luke Barton, who is a musician. He’s incorporated recordings of plants growing and birds at YSP, as well as Morris dancers and my grandad playing the accordion. These samples feed into a soundscape that takes visitors through all four seasons. 

ES: It’s interesting that you’ve mentioned theatricality. Your work in Touch Wood inspired by the misericords makes me think of colourful historical storytelling such as Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1387–1400), with its bawdy humour and celebration of working-class narratives. 

JB: Exactly. I like imagining what regular people were doing. We’re not that far removed from them. Although we learn about ourselves through the past, history is often viewed through a very narrow, formal perspective. If you were working the land, you’d be surrounded by nature, which can be hard. I can see where this view of it as something powerful and monstrous comes from. I think we’ve lost that.

ES: Can you tell us about the craft processes that you have used in Touch Wood? Are there any techniques that you tried for the first time?

JB: I’ve made works primarily in textile and ceramic, which are very much the core mediums in my practice. All the works are made by hand and the textile pieces have involved months and months of work. I would say they are the most ambitious textile pieces I have made in terms of scale – it was a real learning curve. I always talk about the calming and meditative aspect of hand sewing – the meeting of head and hand – but with these I was close to tears on a few occasions. They just wouldn’t play ball. I’m so happy with the outcome of them though. They feel so alive and powerful, which is just what I wanted when I decided to transform the little medieval wooden sculptures into big, imposing, powerful characters. The show also includes basketry, metal and glass, although I can’t take credit for all of those elements. They add richness and complexity for the eye so that it never gets bored.

ES: There’s a strong thread of inherited skills running from we are flowers of one garden to Touch Wood. In the former, you thought about the skills you learned from your mum, and in the latter you’re exploring your family tradition of hop farming. How far does your knowledge of this ancestry go? 

JB: My mum is very interested in family trees and ancestry. We go to the local churchyards and it’s quite amazing to see the places where my family have been buried for over hundreds of years. There’s no exciting royalty, just people registered to labour on the land; it goes quite far back. The crafts I employ are functional. I’m interested in the handmade but not high-end embroidery or fine beadwork. For textile works I always use blanket stitch, which would have been used by people living in poverty who made things from scraps of material. There’s also a relationship to the body: it’s often the stitch used to sew people up. Even the clay I use, there’s a functionality to it – it’s earthy – and the hessian I use comes from plants. I’m taking something that might be functional or overlooked – in the same way I’m remaking these small wooden misericords – and elevating them in a space where they can be beautiful or monstrous. 

ES: Thinking about that relationship with the body, many of the sculptures in we are flowers of one garden and Touch Wood feature the human form trapped in or emerging from another object

JB: Yes, there’s a blur of the body. You could look at them as being trapped or fused. There’s an obvious parallel with our interconnectedness with the earth and nature, but I’m also interested in the connection we have with human-made structures. Throughout history, nature and the body have inspired building design – columns in Classical architecture often have foliate motifs and Greek temples were modelled on the proportions of the human body, for example. Many of the body parts are my own but I don’t want the work to be necessarily ‘about’ me. I’m making votive objects for existence. Part of this is about claiming a space or giving purpose to my existence. It’s also about the ancient idea of metamorphosis – in the human consciousness, we often see ourselves in animals or objects.

ES: we are flowers of one garden was the first time that your mum’s face was cast in the work and she returns in Touch Wood. Why do you directly incorporate her body in your practice?

JB: A lot of my work is a love letter to my mum and nan. When I was growing up, my mum would drop me at my nan’s when she went to work, and my nan would teach me to knit and sew. She wouldn’t do fine needle work; it was very functional. We’d sit in front of the television and chat and I loved it. When I was at art school, the sculpture department always seemed to be a very masculine environment, I was in painting but I still wanted to make three-dimensional, sculptural objects so I relied on the knowledge I already had: the textile skills that I was taught as a child. Later, when I decided to create bigger things, I got my mum involved. She helped me quite a lot with my early shows.

In we are flowers of one garden I wanted to make an ode to her, not only as my mum, but also as a big influence on my work. Her garden is beautiful. She loves flowers and she works hard at it. I thought that was a great springboard for the exhibition. I wanted to capture some permanence, so I cast her body in it. The show was beautiful to create and it was magical to share with her. Making work can allow me to feel more powerful and motivated to make change outside the art world. It can be disempowering to focus on the negatives, which is difficult at the moment as there are so many awful things to be concerned about. How do you fight that?

ES: Growing up in the United Kingdom, I definitely had the impression that we were in a constant state of sociocultural progress, which, in retrospect, is far from the truth. In making Touch Wood I wonder if you have noticed any parallels between contemporary and medieval values towards sexuality, gender and class?

JB: I’ve been thinking about this. It’s hard to project. Many of those perspectives were never documented. A lot of our understanding around sexuality has been moulded over the last two hundred years. Prior to that, on the occasions when homosexuality was evoked in art, it was sometimes linked to humour. But I like to imagine that people are people and it’s always going to have been there. Similarly, before the Reformation there would have been women considered to be healers, who held prominent roles in their community. But this was extinguished with the intensive period of witch-hunting in Europe from the fifteenth century onwards. Previously thought of as intelligent and talented women, they were suddenly rebranded as dangerous witches.

We’re now making a huge amount of progress socially, but there’s always backlash and people resisting. I hone in on bits from the past that have the potential for magic, things that have the potential to empower, that have survived in secrecy.

ES: Your reworking of the misericords would seem to capture that. It’s exciting to think that the person who carved the nude man bending over would have a significant exhibition dedicated to their moment of expression over five hundred years later. 

JB: What’s amazing about the misericords is that they are nameless. This is just freedom of expression and pure joy. Using it as an emblem is incredibly powerful. Within this church – which is full of emblems of authority, both religious and political, as we can’t forget the role of patronage in these spaces – there’s this little man baring his bum. We have our systems of value and status, but I want to show humans and even their bodily functions alongside other more ‘serious’ subjects, just like they did in the Middle Ages. We all have the desire to laugh and love; we question our existence in the same way now as we did then.

ES: Although the distinction between secular and religious life exists today in a way that can’t be applied to the time when the misericords were created, they nonetheless seem to manifest as punctures in official narratives. They offer a more human perspective of this period in history. There’s also a strong history of pagan imagery, mythical creatures and goddesses from our land that many don’t connect with growing up. All of this leads the body to be cut off from pleasure and the natural world.

JB: I think many people are seeking that connection again and to challenge historical biases. Victorian attitudes towards sexuality, for example, were a matter of ownership. For me, what’s really fascinating about churches is that they’ve been better preserved than other types of buildings. They are rich material for tracing our histories. In many other areas, such as houses or farms, the past has been erased. The fact that these images have endured in churches of all places blows my mind – it’s a story of survival.

BY tom mORton, Review for Frieze Magazine | 30 JAN 2023

Jonathan Baldock Cultivates an Unearthly Garden of Delights

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.

Lotte Johnson (Curator Barbican Art Gallery)

Jonathan Baldock: A Transfigured Landscape

The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end. A time that does not cleave the day with rush hours, lunch breaks, the last bus home. As you walk in the garden you pass into this time – the moment of entering can never be remembered. Around you the landscape lies transfigured. Here is the Amen beyond the prayer.

—Derek Jarman, Modern Nature, 1992

Jonathan Baldock has transformed the spaces at Stephen Friedman Gallery into a landscapepopulated by anthropomorphic flower sculptures, which tenderly incorporate his own as well as his mother’s body parts. The exhibition is a love letter to her and a rumination on cherished relationships, the garden as an environment of transfiguration and our collective place on earth.

The matriarchs in Baldock’s life have long had meaningful roles in his practice. As a child, he was initially taught knitting, sewing and crocheting by his grandmother while his motherwas at work, and subsequently his mother continued to pass on her own knowledge to him. Despite not being from an artistic background, she had acquired various craft skills at school that she later shared with Baldock, including helping with his early work. In his exhibition‘My biggest fear is that someone will crawl into it’ at Space Studios in Hackney in 2017, the artist invited visitors to enter the building through a doorway refashioned as a gaping mouth and then into a nest-like king-sized bed surrounded by stitched drapes, within which his mother’s voice could be heard reciting her own journals in a hushed whisper. She had written these texts specifically for her children, informed by her regret at not asking her own mother to share her stories. This interest in genealogy and shared narratives extends into ‘we are flowers of one garden’, in which Baldock takes his mother’s garden in Kent as his source.This beloved site is an outlet of creativity and a space of pride for his mother, one which she has tended with the same deep care as a parent might nurture a child. This garden is a place of generative fantasy – where imagination can literally take root through planting – as well as a site of respite and restoration.

Baldock’s sculptural flowers continue this fantasy even further. Each creation features a ceramic centre – also known as the pistil, the central female organ of a flower – framed by fabric petals. From each of these fertile sites emerges a human form: a vibrant orange glazed face with a pink serpentine tongue escaping from its mouth, a single ear framed by two clasping hands, a plaster pink face with rose-like petals for eyes. The body parts that animatethese forms are derived from Baldock and his mother – for example, their hands reach out together from the centre of one of the flower sculptures. This series marks the first time that the artist has incorporated elements of a body other than his own. These humanoid plant beings bring to mind Salvador Dalí’s Surrealist Flowers lithographs from 1972 and hisFlorDalí series of embellished botanical engravings, in which the roots of a tiger lily metamorphose into plump lips, pointing fingers spring forth from the petals of a dahlia, and a sprig of cherries sprout an ear. Baldock describes how he enjoys transgressing the rules of contemporary art, embracing what he has observed as taboo elements – including bold colour and a love for all things kitsch – as tactics of radical joy. He finds power in reclaiming things that have been little-seen or less-recognised, including his deliberate foregrounding of craft-centred media and techniques, such as ceramics and textiles, historically marginalised as inferior to fine art. These materials have instead given him autonomy and licence to experiment.

In the first gallery space, the anthropomorphic flowers are arranged in a dance-like formation, lining the walls and circling a series of ceramic vases placed at their centre, as if presenting the plucked fruits of the gardener’s labour. Choreographic staging is characteristic of Baldock’s installations, often creating immersive worlds and placing his sculptures in theatrical tableaux, implying a performative act that may have just taken place, or one that is about to unfold. Some previous shows have been activated by performances, complete with costumes designed by the artist. His sculptures explore shapeshifting bodies. Rather than inanimate objects, Baldock sees them as characters who populate the worlds that he creates.A recent work, titled Eating feelings (a conversation) (2020), stages a dialogue between two marionette figures, both bestowed with some of Baldock’s cast body parts. One stands upright, suspended by puppet strings that suggest imminent action, and featuring a swelling pregnant stomach along with Baldock’s ears, hands and feet. In ‘we are flowers of one garden’, the flowers intermingle Baldock’s and his mother’s body parts, making it impossible to distinguish which body or face is whose; the resulting characters refuse gender binaries.One can imagine the circle of androgynous flowers in the gallery springing into motion and circling the viewers, implicating us in a dance or spiritual ceremony. As Baldock has previously reflected: ‘Pagan rituals are an obvious draw for me because it’s an imagining of a world where I am included.’

Baldock began conceiving this series of works after experiencing loss for the first time, when a close friend passed away, prompting him to reflect on the precarity and potential brevity of life. The artist describes the exhibition partly as a way of keeping hold of his mother. He finds comfort in the cyclical nature of plants, how they return year after year, and solace in the idea that humans return to the earth, contribute to its fertility, and come back to life through the plants that grow from their remains. Humans and plants are interconnected in numerous, mutually supportive ways, most notably in the former’s reliance on the oxygenproduced by photosynthesis, enabling us to breathe. Like humans, plants are genetically complex beings, with sensory systems. Baldock is interested in things that we share rather than those that divide us, which extends to nature and our symbiotic relationship with plants.Even the materials that Baldock uses insist on a close proximity to the natural world: each of the flowers’ petals are stitched together with hessian and linen – natural, plant-based fabrics –while clay – a material derived from the earth itself – forms each of the flowers’ centre and emergent body parts, further uniting the human and organic.

The history of gardening is one that is inextricable from the history of class, gender and sexuality. Gardens have long been sites for the imposition of social hierarchies as well as environments for resistance. They can be spaces that have been controlled and shaped by gendered land ownership, power, wealth and forced labour; they can be communal contexts of utopic dreams; they can be safe havens that offer peace and respite; they can provide shelter and refuge; they can be bases for guerrilla gatherings and urban interventions. For Baldock, the garden is also a place that can offer a space beyond gender and class, perhaps akin to how artist Derek Jarman approached his unusual garden at Dungeness – a blooming, sculptural landscape forged amid the unlikely context of Kent’s desert-like shingle. Baldockvisited Dungeness as a young boy during expeditions to tag birds with the Young Ornithologists’ Club. However, it wasn’t until later in life that he learned about Jarman’s existence there. Jarman embraced a wild mix of planting – from cottage-garden classics such as lupins, to unruly self-seeding species like wild sweet peas, native ness plants including gorse, broom, blackthorn and valerian, coastal varieties of sea holly, sea campion and sea kale, as well as resilient plants often considered as weeds like mallow and woody nightshade.His garden at Prospect Cottage evolved into a radical space – not only contesting norms around gardening but also offering an escape from the politics of a Thatcherite Britain, complete with tyrannically oppressive attitudes towards queer experiences and the growing AIDS crisis. It was at Dungeness that he was canonised as Saint Derek of Dungeness by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in 1991. The salve of the ‘transfigured’ landscape of the garden that Jarman describes in his book Modern Nature is not dissimilar to the one that Baldock seeks to create – a space of liberation, of time without ‘past or future, beginning or end’, without societal boundaries and binaries.

A soundscape accompanies Baldock’s sculptural garden: he worked with artist Luke Barton to produce a sonic collage that weaves together a recording of his farm labourer grandfather playing the accordion (with his grandmother audible laughing in the background), along with field recordings of plants that resound like heartbeats, and excerpts of both Baldock and his mother singing ‘Wild Flowers’ by Dolly Parton. As Parton reminds us:

When a flower grows wild
It can always survive
Wildflowers don’t care where they grow.

For Baldock, the space of the garden is one of union, resilience and survival.

The senses are stimulated further as smells intermingle with the sounds that accompany us. Many of the sculptures have dried flowers or plants stuffed into their mouths – from chamomile to lavender to hibiscus. Baldock relishes in the sensory experience of making and he is fascinated by how scent can transport and trigger psychological associations. For his exhibition ‘I Am Still Learning’ at La Casa Encendida in Madrid in 2021, he invited artist Alex Margo Arden to produce a scent that mimicked the smells described by people who had encountered paranormal activity. Meanwhile, in ‘we are flowers of one garden’, one sculpture has hops pressed into it, its heady aroma summoning further layers of Baldock’s personal history by referencing his family’s experiences as hop harvesters.

The climax of the show is the presence of the Mother Flower, a monumental sculpture that presides over the gallery’s second space. Rather than featuring Baldock or his mother, theapplique patterns adorning this deity-like being draw on folk art practices from the UK, the Netherlands, Poland, Germany and Romania that borrow from nature. Three smaller flowers turn to face this epic creature, whose huge fleshy root sprawls down the wall, snaking across the floor as if looking for fertile ground beyond the polished gallery floor. The padded roots of the flower opposite crawl out towards her, its tendrils seeking connection to this life-giving maternal force. Baldock and his chorus of flowers ask us to join them in their worship of this Mother, invite us to inhabit this transfigured landscape and share in their joy amidst the conflicted landscape of loss and oppressive power structures that persists outside the garden.

Rebecca Lewin
A then and a there: the performance of utopia in the work of Jonathan Baldock

In his book Cruising Utopia, the academic José Esteban Muñoz remarks “It is productive to think about utopia as flux, a temporal disorganization, as a moment when the here and the now is transcended by a then and a there that could be and indeed should be.” Muñoz goes on to explain the important link between the temporal and the spatial that the performance of utopia encapsulates, and it is this link that offers a useful portal through which to enter into a consideration of Jonathan Baldock’s work (more about portals later).

Baldock, born in Kent, UK, in 1980, originally trained as a painter, albeit one whose early works were not confined to the surface of the canvas. One of his first solo exhibitions, Memories and Encounters (Viafarini, Milan, 2009) presented canvases that were left raw, or thickly layered into impasto surfaces that verged on reliefs. Each two-dimensional panel was paired with, obscured by or set in relation to sculptural forms. A motif such as the multi-coloured diamonds of a harlequin ballooned out from flat planes across papier-mâché accretions and over-stuffed fabric shapes. A cuboid structure could also be read simultaneously as a plinth and a body; a painting could also be a stage or a frame.

These mercurial turns—applying the same visual motif to different works and producing them in various media—built an approach to making that creates worlds rather than single objects. Baldock has employed materials ranging from clay and fabric to glass, wax and wood, constructing forms and staging spaces that can be activated by the viewer’s imagination. A strange cross between a butcher’s shop and a nightclub, shown at Wysing Arts Centre in 2013, offered just such a set of clues from which fantastic narratives could be woven. As the curator and writer Kathy Noble observed in her text from the following year, “I found myself surrounded by things that I wanted to touch, pick up, or use; strange primal, perhaps Neolithic, entities made from clay, wool and felt, in primary colours—tools that were for a task that was unknown to me at that moment.” Some of the things that she described had humanoid decorations, while others could be donned by performers (as well as by Noble and Baldock for a live conversation).

For other installations and performances, as in Book of Love (2015), Judder & Shudder I & II (2018) and Figures in a Landscape (2018), Baldock has designed costumes for dancers that at once suggest the cultures being drawn on for the choreography of their movements, while directing or obscuring the audience’s ability to closely observe the bodies of the performers. The fluidity with which he moves between different kinds of materials is matched by the variety of ways in which the resulting objects are intended to be experienced. Activated by performers, and sometimes by Baldock himself, sculptures become masks, drapery becomes costumes, the very walls and floors of the gallery space become stages and backdrops.

I Am Still Learning (La Casa Encendida, 2021) doubles down on his previous embrace of world-building, play and performance, reaching out beyond the gallery walls to remind us of our (mostly) lost connections to the natural world, which humans have performed for millennia through folklore and pre-Judeo-Christian rites and rituals. Structured around the classical European concepts of four seasons and four elements, I Am Still Learning makes clear that it is the human body, whether obscured, extended or revealed, that is our most powerful portal to empathising with and learning from the non-human. Here, a golden sun is given eyes, a corn dolly resembles a human face—even the scent produced by fellow artist Alex Margo Arden to suggest the paranormal is composed of smells associated with encounters with human ghosts. The sonic landscape emanating from some of Baldock’s objects, composed by Luke Barton, is informed by stone tape theory, according to which the sound of events can be impressed upon, and therefore played back from the surfaces of certain objects. The desire to converse with the inanimate is dependent upon interpreting and producing a sound that is audible to human ears.

Two of the many pieces in the exhibition are costumes made by Baldock for himself and another collaborator, artist Rafał Zajko, which were worn by them for a series of performances that took place in the show’s opening days. Like Baldock’s previous costumes, human and non-human motifs decorate their surfaces, while the proportions of the performer are extended or obscured—here, by long nails and headdresses with masks situated well above the performers’ heads. Moving from a central stage out into the space during the performance, the figures appear to breathe through their otherwise static masks, expelling white smoke over the surfaces of several of the objects in the exhibition, imparting a blessing or perhaps casting an animating spell.

The collaborations in I Am Still Learning with Margo Arden and Barton, but equally in previous projects with Emma Hart, Florence Peake and Tanzcompagnie Rubato, are part of a lineage of artistic production that draws multiple forms of creative expression into its orbit. We might follow this thread from Oskar Schlemmer’s costumes for Triadic Ballet (1922), performed by other Dada artists, to the esoteric visual language developed by the English camping and hiking organisation the Kibbo Kift (1920−1932) and the collaborative endeavours of Michael Clark, Leigh Bowery and Charles Atlas on works like Hail the New Puritan (1986). The combination of ritual, dance, costume, and stylised recording of the presentation of those elements could be seen as an overlaying of the traditional fields of dance, fashion, performance, film, photography and design. However, rather than attempting to confuse the distinct properties of each of the traditional forms that they include, this approach queers their sense of sovereignty. For Muñoz, this is “what I would describe as a world-making performativity. In this methodological performance the routinization of approach is thrown out the window in favor of vibrant collage”. Baldock’s practice embraces this whole-heartedly from a collage of other artists and of multiple materials, but the last and most affective collage is the bringing together of the objects he makes with the narrative guesswork being done by the visitor.

They have already stepped into Baldock’s world by entering the gallery; they may choose to remain observant of the scene, but the changes in lighting, flooring and wall colours, and the expanded field occupied by his objects mean that they must always be aware of a network of relationships of which their body is a part. Baldock’s exhibitions—conceived anew each time, and always comprising a set of forms produced specifically for that space—recall long-forgotten archaeological landscapes, or theatrical stages that the “true” performers have just exited, casting the visitor in the role of historical sleuth or unwitting understudy. If Muñoz offers us a portal through which to consider time and space, we might also turn to Augusto Boal and his Theatre of the Oppressed in order to consider the relations at play in Baldock’s installations.

Like Muñoz’s utopia—”a then and a there that could be and indeed should be”—Boal’s Theatre sought to function as a framework through which to develop stories and narratives, but which could also be employed as a mirror to reveal and upset implicit power structures in real-world relationships. For example, if two “spect-actors” (Boal’s term for the participants whose roles both create and observe performances) switch real or ideological masks, they can be empowered to empathise with or critique the position they began with. This thread is one that runs through the centre of Baldock’s practice. In a recent conversation, he observed:

[As a queer person], Pagan rituals are an obvious draw for me because it’s an imagining of a world where I am included. There’s a magic to that, a breaking down and a reimagining of other possibilities that are far more ancient where I still get to have a spiritual aspect to my being. Using art not just as a way of extending my relationship to the physical world but also potentially other worlds is why I am constantly exploring the inner and the outer, portals, touching the floor to the ceiling, through holes in the work . . . That’s why I’m drawn to practices that have been suppressed or forgotten, and reconnecting with those.

Physical connections with other humans have always been the basis for the stories and myths that we have told, and their lack was perhaps felt most keenly during the pandemic of 2020, but the anthropomorphic tendencies of creation stories, folklore and indigenous tradition that Baldock draws from offer us the most direct reconnection with nature. Or, to stay with Muñoz, the queering of a narrative that has otherwise presented “us” and “nature” as binary terms. In the context of his use of ecological references within the structure of I Am still learning, Baldock seems to be suggesting an urgent need to improve our connections to nature as a whole, but just as important are the microscopic shifts that can take place whenever a sense of empathy is reached. The title of this exhibition was taken by Baldock from a c. 1826 drawing by Francisco de Goya, in which an aged figure (perhaps Goya himself) feels his way through the dark with the help of two canes. The implication is at once wry and pathetic—that even as an old man, the artist is still a beginner—but crucially, that the continued attempt to reach beyond “the here and the now” and the experience that one does have into “a then and a there” is the most important type of learning that we can undertake.

Baldock’s search for “the essential things that connect us” has led him to a recurring inclusion of human and humanoid forms, to a deep sense of materiality that draws us into close physical proximity to his objects, and to guide the viewer towards imaginaries that not only connect the pieces he has brought together in the exhibition space but which also offer portals through which to escape to that other “then and there”. If Baldock, by nature of being an artist, inhabits the role of “Joker” (Boal again) who sets up a situation and encourages responses to it, both the visitor and the artworks are the “spect-actors”. The human and non-human must work together in order to approach a utopia in which it is possible to achieve a better understanding of the other by imagining oneself into the skin of the other, by inserting oneself phenomenologically into its body, by placing its mask over our own face.

Commissioned by La Casa Encendida, Madrid for “An Involuntary Trace” curated by This is Jackalope

By Helena Haimes, 2022
Jonathan Baldock: Grave Goods

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.

Edward Ball, March 2019

Fault Lines, exhibition text

Susan Sontag was right: we need an erotics of art. To privilege context and reference ahead of the vitality of the encounter with Jonathan Baldock’s art is to tame it. Let its carnality leap out at you.

Baldock’s sculptures make me think of skin, and how hard those cells work to contain, to give shape, to hold things in. The artist’s most recent body of work comprises gruesome amalgamations of woven fibres, latex and ceramics. In April 2019, ahead of his forthcoming solo exhibition at Camden Arts Centre, Baldock produced a maquette study, which functions here as something of a prelude. The work is a totemic sculpture of six hollow ceramic cylinders, one atop the other. The tower threatens to topple at any moment. Wretched souls emerge from its bone-like surface in ripples of anguished figuration. A hand reaches out, searchingly. Tongues stick out in impunity. Hand-spun yarn spills from the cracks and crevices like entrails. Lips, ears and mouths protrude.  Crass emojis pockmark the surface, in turns winking, guffawing and gritting their teeth. Like body language, emojis are non-verbal revelations–an emotive shorthand Baldock uses to monumentalise what the British ‘stiff upper lip’ does its best to suppress–our true nature. The unconscious gesture of Baldock’s sculptures betrays them. They are at the point of utterance, of giving themselves away–a dam about to burst. The thing is, you often feel better after letting it all out.

Baldock’s new series of ceramic masks likewise speak to the potentially thin veneer of our psychic realm. Simple rectangular tiles hover at the edge of figuration–sumptuous ripples and folds combine with violent insertions of other objects into the ceramic surface, hinting at faciality. Baldock asks–what happens when the mask slips? How far are any of us from this point? ‘Mirror mirror on the wall’–they reflect back to us.

Baldock is also drawn to the knottiness of textile–weaving in particular. In his exhibition THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME at CGP London, 2017, a hybrid cast of monstrous characters face one another across a circle, as though in a group therapy session. The tongue-in-cheek conceit effaces something deeper–each seems on the verge of a confession. How exhausting it can be sometimes, holding it together. One character, an anthropomorphised pot, literally spills the beans. Another recoils, turning away from the group in camp outrage. Stitches and seams dominate as a motif. Baldock’s forms are overstuffed, and the fabric is stretched to bursting. The skin they live in threatens not to hold. There are orifices everywhere, which bespeak desire, vulgar sexuality, shame, and pleasure. They are portals into hidden depths of the psyche–places we aren’t meant to see. Yet the warm undercurrent of bawdiness drags these figures out of abjection, and into a poetics of reparation.

Baldock revels in the parts that we try to keep hidden–from others, and from ourselves. Cutting, stitching, mending, making-do-his is a sculptural metaphor of repair. To an extent we constantly remake ourselves. Baldock shows us the cathartic power of art and making.

Text by Skye Sherwin, April 2018

Camden Arts Centre, residency text 

During his residency at Camden Arts Centre, Jonathan Baldock has been emptying out large bags of wet clay, which he rolls flat, and fixes together to form tubes that he works over before leaving to air dry. Once the resulting segments have been fired and glazed a matt, stone white, they are sealed together like bricks, forming cylinders that are then stacked to make towering pale columns, which will be grouped together. They recall the thrusting, phallic colonnades of classical architecture. Yet the artist has flipped the suggestion of the pure, durable, chiselled marble that became a cornerstone of Western culture, on its head.

At times the clay has been slit or punctured from the inside to form openings, suggesting–like Lucio Fontana’s cut paintings and ceramics–mouths, buttholes, vaginas or wounds. Walking around this tall but gawky group, we can discover short ceramic pipes extending outwards here and there. By turns crude and endearing, they might be droopy penises, noses or teapot handles and spouts. Where the artist’s nude torso, modelled in clay, emerges from a column, two spouts straddle it. The improvised arms of snowmen come to mind, as does, once more, the classical world, with its ruined, limbless statues. Then there are the emojis, the grinning, winking, crying faces, the love hearts and the poos, which decorate the shafts like badges.

It’s a resolutely anti-monumental approach that has hitherto seen Baldock mix up the friable stuff of 21st century life–domestic goings-on, fallible bodies, libidinal currents, rude jokes and cute asides–with references to modernist art and ancient cultures and their notions of pure forms or lasting values. He’s previously employed a wide range of crafts including knitting, felting and glassblowing to do so. This though, is his most extensive experiment with clay, one of the oldest and most primal art mediums. Its qualities are uniquely physical: literally earthy, worked by hand and with overtones of dough or shit.

All of which makes it a far from obvious and partly ironic choice for a salient feature of these latest works: rendering the insubstantial pictorial language of the digital realm, emojis, in solid form. That ceramics are made the old-fashioned way is a point stressed by a cast of the artist’s open hand. It extends from a column, as if trying to make contact, but the emojis underline that in the 21st century this is less likely to be physical than via a quick message on a touchscreen phone.

Pictograms scratched out in clay however, are also one of the earliest surviving forms of written language. Indeed, Baldock’s research process during his residency has included studying the British Museum’s collection of Mesopotamian clay tablets, which trace the evolution from pictograms into cuneiform script’s semi-abstract marks, and the earliest of which date back 5000 years. Written in extinct Assyrian, they run the gamut of cultural life across millennia, from literature like The Epic of Gilgamesh, to spells, recipes, bills and love letters. The comparison is a tragi-comic one, raising questions about what traces we will and won’t leave to future generations with a cartoon cast of pictograms that depend on the continuation of digital technology for existence.

For all their limitations however, emojis do say something quite specific about our interactions in the 21st century. In the soundless, disembodied realm of SMS, they have emerged as a necessary shorthand for emotional emphasis. When texting, words alone seldom seem adequate when it comes to expressing ‘tears of joy’, ‘grimacing’, or ‘thumbs up’ (to name a few of the feelings the artist quotes from the SMS lexicon). The emoji is perfectly suited to brief messages and, as we might think, considering these clay shafts’ suggestive gauged holes, the anonymous hook-up.

Though this group of columns ape the mute supports of the ancient world, they are not in fact, without sound. Lean close and you become privy to an audible internal world: a mixture of songs hummed and the kind of random thoughts one has when walking the streets; even stomach grumbles.

This gap between appearances and what goes on underneath is further emphasised by the ceramic masks Baldock has been creating using huge rectangular tiles of clay. Decorated in attention-grabbing glazes that veer from deep purple to tangerine, fleshy pink to shimmering granite grey, they are as exhibitionistic as the columns are retiring. Their features are little more than lines and holes sliced or punched into the clay, recalling Picasso’s masks and, again, Fontana. There is more than a hint of the animal forces, the sex and ferocity, those modernist titans channelled. Yet it’s mixed with a charming goofiness. Here a hapless grin is filled with pom-poms, the lips stitched together. There, more disturbingly, both the eyes and mouth of a mask are stuffed with fat discs bearing emojis, resembling supersized pills. Made with a cookie-cutter, Baldock’s smiley faces inevitably recall retro slang for ecstasy: disco biscuits.

The melt between inner life and its outward expression that the ‘love drug’ is famed for, makes a telling counterpoint for work concerned with stunted expression. For these awkward ceramics with their rough seams, saggy holes and imperfect lines, the bridge between the internal and external world isn’t easily navigated.

Review by Chris Sharratt, March 2018
Jonathan Baldock and Emma Hart; De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, UK, FRIEZE Magazine 

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’.

Review by Grace Beaumont, December 2016
Jonathan Baldock and Emma Hart, PEER, Artforum, Critics Picks

“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

Review by Paul Carey-Kent, December 2016
Jonathan Baldock and Emma Hart: Love Life, Act 1,
PEER, Art Monthly 402,  p. 26–27

This show turns Peer’s recently refurbished gallery into a satirical version of domestic spaces in which Emma Hart and Jonathan Baldock reimagine the traditional seaside entertainment of Punch and Judy. The theme generates a backdrop of innate violence, and multiple eyes suggest that this could be linked to such current forms of bullying as surveillance and online trolling. Visitors find themselves in the middle of a disputatious mise-en-scène, populated by objects that are carefully constructed but which remain approximate, more like props than real things, though Hart does spell out one wall text in real sausages to keep us on our toes. As I recall, Punch and Judy’s arguments were typically about either sausages or the baby, and Hart pops in her own child: Locket and Chain (all works 2016) displays her daughter’s photo in a giant piece of jewellery.

The combination of conflict and provisionality suits a collaboration between two artists who have their own separate practices, with potential for disagreement as artistic egos clash and seesaw towards a less settled identity. Moreover, this is not a fixed installation, as Act 2 will be in the much bigger venue of the Grundy in Blackpool, before the concluding Act 3 washes up at a smaller but very tall space in the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill. From Peer to seaside towns with piers, there will be plenty of change ahead. Neither future stop, moreover, will repeat the natural theatre of how Peer’s windows give onto a busy street, and nor will Punch and Judy’s antics resonate with the vituperative US presidential election, which took place on the opening night of the first Act. If that’s the set-up, what do Hart and Baldock deliver? Nothing as direct as the wooden slapstick with which Punch hits all and sundry, or his combative words. But both artists have practices which tend naturally towards the humour and grotesquery of Punch and Judy: both focus on the body and the handmade, both use various materials but especially ceramic and both like excess and dislike control. That makes it tricky to tell who made what, especially when you consider the possibility of mutual imitation (Marcel Dzama and Raymond Pettibon’s strategy in their recent collaborations). In fact, the only co-produced work provides the show’s sound: the 45rpm record Jon and Emma in which Baldock and Hart–unswazzled, in another avoidance of the obvious–call each other’s names out. Their tones vary from pleading to pained to provocative, in a routine which derives, appropriately, from a 1950s puppeteer.

Beyond the sound, the broad distinction is that Baldock creates the scene and Hart populates it with sculptures which–somewhat paradoxically–portray events. The first room sets Baldock’s giant babywalker A Guiding Hand, featuring his own eye on an all-seeing TV screen, against a red-and-white striped wall-painting recalling a performance tent on the beach. The second room features a hessian screen as an architectural backdrop on which Baldock has applied several eyes, giving it the menacing title Wait until I get you home. That room contains his twisted ceramic version of a cooker as hell, with anthropomorphised saucepans and kiln-firedsausages (It’s not burnt, it’s caramelised), and Out damn’d spot!–a washing machine of sorts which spews forth a tide of clothes. Hart populates the rooms with her action sculptures: Here We Go Again sum mons chase and flight by ringing the first room with ceramic feet wearing glove puppet socks, Bang cuts the shape of a comic explosion from a door which was evidently slammed and three ceramic speech bubbles jut into the space at mouth height so that they can be read from both sides. That explains their title, You two-faced lying motherfucker, and there is fun to be had wondering which order to read them in: is it, for example, ‘I do/nice things’ or ‘Sooo long/nice things’? Does ‘cross your legs/the way you use a knife’ make sense?

 ‘Love Life: Act 1’ is  considerable fun. In fact, it is so cheerful it’s hard to take the implied fighting too seriously. That is no surprise, as Hart and Baldock have collaborated before and are evidently good friends. Perhaps, also, it is consistent with Punch and Judy’s arguments being predicated on underlying harmony: I used to live above a couple who got on very well by means of constant rows. But is that the way to do it? I found myself wondering if Love Life I was a bit too upbeat. Consider: we woke after the opening to President-elect Trump. How would it be if the artists fell out and their enmity was enacted in the gallery? If that happens before Blackpool, it might take this entertaining knockabout to another level.

Text by Ilaria Puri Purini, November 2016
Jonathan Baldock and Emma Hart
‘Love Life: Act 1’ at PEER, The Contemporary Art Society: Friday Dispatch

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.

Interview with Judith Carlton, 2016
A conversation with Judith Carlton,
Director of CGP, London, NOTION Magazine, Issue 72, pp. 218–223

In 2017, CGP London will commission an ambitious new solo exhibition by Jonathan Baldock. It will be his largest work to date and his first solo exhibition in a public institution in London. Working across both CGP gallery sites; a large-scale sculptural installation will fill Dilston Grove (a former church and the first poured concrete structure in the UK). This installation will accompany a more formal exhibition of new works in The Gallery space.

JC
I have been fascinated by your recent collaboration with the Kokoro Dance Company in Canada Jonathan, especially at this time in your career where your sculptures are starting to move of their own accord! Where did your love of all things costume come from and what role does movement play in your sculptural practice?

JB
Body ornamentation is the oldest art form that we have evidence of. It represents the evolution of human artistic creativity. For me that makes it a very potent medium. What we wear can be a form of artistic expression, but it can also communicate identity, it is an extremely powerful tool. I believe one of the few remaining potent non-violent political acts that we can communicate effectively as individuals. If I were to walk down the street in a pink mini-dress then I would be pretty likely to encounter some sort of public abuse, confrontation or stares. I find this amazing that fabric can evoke these kinds of reactions in people. What other “material” could do this. Clothes are a skin and something we may or may not choose to inhabit or express ourselves in.

The costume element to my practice evolved through a fusion of these thoughts and the idea of how a human body could inhabit a work of art. I became fascinated by the idea of my sculptures becoming activated by a person wearing them. A lot of the sculptures that I made alluded to function or narrative so I decided to explore this more with the costumes and making sculptures as costumes. I started to collaborate with the artist and choreographer Florence Peake, and we began an ongoing exploration to the potential ways I could give my sculptures a new form of life. It was really important for me to work with someone who knew how to hold the human body, and worked with the form relentlessly. Florence had done an amazing piece at the Baltic Gateshead on how one might use the body to interact with inanimate objects. It really struck a chord with me. I think there is a fad for artists with no experience working in performance and I didn’t want to go down that route. I needed to learn from a master. We have worked together many times now and she has been a huge inspiration to me.

The recent collaboration with Kokoro Dance in Vancouver happened after a solo exhibition I had in Vancouver. I had made some costumes to be exhibited and asked Jay and Barbara to inhabit them. They did a totally improvised piece and blew me away. They have been dancing for years and are phenomenal. They contacted me some months later and asked if I would be involved in a piece they were working on called “The Book of Love”. The roles between me as the costume/set designer, and the choreography of Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi (of Kokoro Dance) were clearly defined and the act of collaboration was more independent. I let my imagination go wild with woven basket-like headpieces, and then they responded to them in the realisation of the choreography. It was exciting to see my work on a theatre stage and very different from the gallery arena.

JC
I like the phrase “gallery arena”, it makes me wonder how or if you feel that your audiences activate your works when they are installed in a more formal gallery setting (such as your 2D works for example) without activation by performers such as the wonderful Florence. 

JB
Absolutely. I don’t feel they rely on activation from performers. First and foremost all works have to exist independently in there own right, and that is very important to me. The fact that they suggest potential activation by the audience is a bonus. One of the key objectives within my practice recently has been concerned with encouraging the audience to “step inside” the work, and gain an all-immersive experience. It is my hope that my installations provide an alternate reality. A stage with which the sculptures are characters each with unique personalities. Although the works have a playful theatricality I do not consider them props in any way. Each sculpture is meticulously crafted, it is about the body and made of the body. The performances focus on an interaction and conversation between the human form and that of the sculptures often with the human appearing less “alive” than the performer. Smaller objects within the installation allude to certain unknown imagined functions that are put into question when performed. Not is all what it appears.

JC
I have long admired how your work somehow manages to straddle so many contrasting aspects–formal cut-out-esque patterning and ‘design’ of sorts with the playful, comforting, tactile and humorous. You make me think of Matisse and Kabuki Theatre. It’s a lazy question but I am going for it–where do your ideas come from? How do your many influences manifest in a new body of work?

JB
I have a very guttural instinct in making work. I start with an idea, and it evolves organically into its final form. I make a lot of decisions as I go along and collect the many art historical references that my work is immersed as the work grows. I have a particular soft spot for art from the early/mid 20^th Century which I feel was one of the most creative periods in western art history. This is a period when the western art canon really started to be informed by influences and ideas from around the world. Art was transformed. When I study the likes of Moore, Hepworth, Klee, Matisse, Nagochi, Picasso etc. it is not just there work that I investigate, but also their influences. What and who were there inspirations and motivations? Of course in many cases this was non-western art and even theatre like Japanese Kabuki. I should add than in doing this I am not critiquing there work. These are artists I adore, but I like the idea that I offer up other potential directions with which the many concerns of the day could of gone in.

The early/mid twentieth century was also a period where the line between art and theatre, and many other disciplines became really blurred. An example could be found with the many collaborations of Diaghilev who was instrumental in bringing art, dance and music together with artists such as Picasso, Matisse, Miro and Dali.

I am super interested in the idea of the working have a universal language. And what universally understood symbols there are out there. It is why the mask for instance is a recurring motif within my work. It is some that spans almost all cultures and civilisations.

JC
I am excited to be working with you on a new ambitious bod of work for CGP London in 2017. Do you think there will be any links to your recent DAAD residency in Bad Ems in celebration of all things DADA? 

JB
I think one thing that my DADA themed residency at Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral confirmed is that all contemporary art owes a huge debt to DADA. I think that contemporary arts current interest in the role of the object within performance has coincided with a resurgence of the object in a variety of research areas including psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and cultural studies. I would say that this significance was an idea first introduced by Dada. I think this is something that I will certainly continue to explore in my exhibition at CGP in 2017. I hope to create an immersive work that encourages the viewer to enter the an interior psychological world which revels in my interest in the performative properties of sculptures. Through simple actions, gestures and performance I want to play with the physical qualities and potentials of materials, objects and sculptures.

Text George Vasey (writer and the curator of the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland.)
July, 2015

A crocheted life-sized figure is slouched in the corner of the gallery. The Guide, 2014, fastidiously constructed by Jonathan Baldock, consists of a body sculpted in thick grey pleats with the hands and feet finished in pink–it is all topped with a series of flowery coronations. The polyester stuffing is oozing out and covers the base of the sculpture. The androgynous character’s legs are gapping wide and it is difficult to tell whether they are dead, or just knackered. The head is missing any discernible features except a pink ceramic nose. She or he remains inscrutable. Like a well-played kid’s toy, the figure feels in need of some tender loving care. Over the previous decade Baldock has developed a cast of these enigmatic characters. Like actors in an experimental theatrical production, they await further instruction.

Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2005, Baldock has established an impressively diverse practice, encompassing an array of materials such as salt dough,hessian, felt, ceramic and glass. Baldock is equally skilled as a knitter, pleater, print-maker and painter, turning his hand to a myriad of styles. Walking through a typical Baldock installation, we recognise elements from art history, such as the stacked sculptures of Constantin Brancusi and the theatrical costumes of Pablo Picasso amongst many other antecedents. Baldock appropriates these recognisable motifs and mixes them with elements from design, fashion and folk histories. He is a magpie formalist, wresting new approaches from existing forms.

Baldock focuses much of his attention on the human form, subjecting it to visual distortion. Limbs become exaggerated and attenuated, stretched and squashed–the body is at times an impediment as well as a site for sensuality. The bulbous anthropomorphism of Moore and Hepworth are an obvious touch stone (Hepworth has been name checked in a series of works made in 2014). Importantly, Baldock undermines the pure formalism of these Modernistic forebears through a more overt confrontation with the carnal. Take his titles; Organs of Narcissus, Titilation, Warm Bodies, Forms with Protrusions. A hole for Baldock is simultaneously sexual, scatalogical and injurious.

In works such as Return the Gaze, 2014–15, Baldock demands his work to look and touch as much as be seen and felt. An oval painting, raked in thick white acrylic paint is completed by an irregular pattern of glass eyes. The abstract canvas is anthropomorphised into a strange creature looking at us across the room. One can draw direct comparisons to George Bataille’s novella, Story of the Eye published in 1928. Writing in 1962, Roland Barthes wrote of the author’s metaphorical interchangeability between the globular form of the eye and the egg. Extending this, Barthes draws on Bataille’s obsession with mucus, tears, semen, milk and urine. Similarly, by eliding the erotic and abstract, one can see Baldock’s painting enacting a complex set of associative metaphors.

In works such as Screen with Peepholes, 2014, the glass eye is replaced by an imaginary voyeur. A muslin screen, decorated with an abstract pattern, hangs like a curtain from the ceiling, creating a division across the gallery space. Cut with holes at different heights, the work invites differing forms of illicit action. If the gaze suggests a moment of reverie, then voyeurism offers a moment of looking without being without being looked at and, with it, the evocation of power that implies. Who exactly is looking at who? We may turn our back on Baldock’s work but they rarely turn their back on us. These obsessions with the ocular are further dramatised in Baldock’s interest in masks. A common motif within the artist’s work–the mask offers a moment of emancipation from the fixity of the wearer’s own identity. Masquerade is a form of camouflage that invites a type of voyeurism–one can potentially act without immediate fear of reproach. By concealing our face, the mask obstructs our ability to read or be read. It is no coincide that masking is a common horror movie trope and often signals a moment of extended trauma.

Baldock’s work can often be very large, taking over the whole gallery space yet the work never feels grand. In replacing the Modernist preference for hard materials such as steel, bronze, plaster and wood, the artist counters the tendency towards monumentality. Similar to artists such as Eva Hesse, Barry Flanagan and Claes Oldenburg, Baldock embraces pliability and suppleness through the use of soft materials such as fabric. The artist’s fondness for patterning and decoration further undermines direct comparisons to canonised art history. One can draw parallels to the early work of Jann Haworth who most famously co-created The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album cover with her then partner Peter Blake. Haworth has, since the Sixties, created a personalised lexicon of domesticated subjects from life-size tableaux. Made via a laborious process of stitching and sewing, these installations conflate issues of domestic (and feminised) labour with a new quotidian iconography that antagonised the then prevalent visibility of Minimalist sculpture. Like Baldock, Haworth’s work dissolves fine art and craft traditions, creating surreal and unsettling scenarios from everyday observation.

In works such as Form with Limbs, 2014, Baldock both satirises and pays homage to archetypal Modernist sculpture. Doughnut forms are covered in patchwork felt and stabbed with terracotta thorns. Completed with small model feet, the work’s diminutive scale makes them look like a maquette for a theatrical production. The colours used; including, electric blue, pink, lemon yellow, lime green and pink further estrange their iconography. In what would have been antithetical to artists such as Hepworth and Moore, Baldock covers the form of the sculpture–he gives it a skin. Fabric both clothes and conceals, working against the Modernist doctrine of “truth to materials”. Where materials such as bronze, marble and steel evoke industry as well as permanence, fabric suggests something more intimately and habitually connected to the body. In Baldock’s work we see this universalist tendency of Moore inscribed by something more idiosyncratic and personal.

In another series, Orifice Painting, also from 2014, Baldock presents a series of canvases with cut holes. Yet the gesture, made famous by Lucio Fontana, here feels more delicate. Fontana’s holes are like abrasive punctures; Baldocks incisions are neatly cut and painstakingly framed by stitched felt. The moment of injury is an opportunity for repair–the wounding is temporary. This narrative of rehabilitation runs through much of the artist’s work, from the suggestion of wounding and bandaging to the application of distended anthropomorphism.

Baldock has increasingly incorporated performative elements within his installations. Recently collaborating with the choreographer and artist Florence Peake, his installations have become animated via durational performances. Typically, Peake inhabits one of Baldock’s characters and enacts a deliberately slow and intimate response to the objects and spectators in the gallery. A form of surreal courtship is formed between the dancer and audience as the sculptures are handled, the body at once elegant and disruptive. Gestures are deliberately exaggerated and abstracted so that if the body is tasked with communicative agency it is one that is only partially legible. One can draw parallels to the Japanese form of Butoh dance with its insistence on imposing limitations on bodily movement.

Baldock is adept at conflating various formal and conceptual registers. His work can be at times comic as well as fastidious, cute and aggressive. These antithetical positions furnish his work with its own unique tensions. While his material approaches are itinerant his focus remains steadfast. At its centre, his practice frames the body and its various activities–from the ritualisation of domestic chores to libidinal desire. Over the last ten years, Baldock has mapped out a unique iconography and it will be fascinating to see where he takes his cast of characters next.

Interview with Eric Thorpe / FAD Magazine online
Emma Hart & Jonathan Baldock
SUCKERZ, July 3rd 2015

London based artists Emma Hart and Jonathan Baldock’s first collaboration ‘SUCKERZ’ is a beautifully grotesque analysis of the absurdly ritualistic world of the dinner party. Their monstrously fantastical creations are displayed, throughout the gallery, in a nauseatingly gastronomic explosion of flesh and excess that explores the physical and mental processes associated with one of the most favorite of middle class pass times. I Managed to catch up with them to find out more about the process involved in creating art as a duo and the reasoning behind their disdain towards such customary events.

ET
Can you tell me a bit about your relationship as artists and how the collaboration came about?

JB
Emma and I met on a residency at Wysing Arts Centre in 2012. I knew Emma’s work before meeting her and really loved it, but what was really magic is that we also got on really well. I identified with her as a person, and could relate to so much of what she said. Up until then I had never had that with another artist, and I found it quite profound. During the residency we quickly became friends, hanging out in the ceramic studio; making together and talking and having a good time. Until Wysing Emma had not made work in clay, but from that point on ceramic quickly became a common medium in both our works. I had some experience with it before, but I would say that now Emma has definitely become somewhat of an expert in it. I started off showing her how to do things, and now she shows me…

ET
How did you find working as a collaborative unit compared to working alone?

JB
The idea for the show had originally been to place some of our older works together in one show just to see what sort of conversation arose between the works. So it wasn’t actually going to be very collaborative at all. Just a dialogue amongst our two practices. As we sat down and started to select works for the show it soon became clear that in addition to our many shared themes, there were also lots of works dealing with the bodily acts and social scenarios of eating. We decided to make a large dinner table to display both our works, and then started making the additional elements that we thought were missing in order to make it a proper dinner party… Or at least what we thought could constitute a dinner party. For me, one of things that make working collaboratively so exciting is that it is an opportunity to work outside of my usual trajectory. I no longer have to justify what I make against my past works. This is totally liberating and opens up opportunities for my practice to be informed by so much more.

ET
Most of the materials used could perhaps be described as craftsy but are depicting these opulently, grotesque forms and acts. Is there an intentional juxtaposition regarding the materials and and what is made with them?

EH
We have used clay, textiles, photographs and found objects as materials. For myself, sculpture most recently ceramics, provides a way to physically corrupt and ‘dirty’ images and forcefully squeeze more life out of them. Clay provides a way to work behind pictures, and reveal the raw, crude, real state of things that images screen off. The dumbness and lumpiness of clay becomes a provocative way to mess things up. With Jonathan’s work craft techniques and materials are pushed to be over the top and excessive. Absurd appearances are conjoured from everyday items and a fantastical alternative is provided to our conventional experiences.

ET
The work, for me, represents the ritualistic aspect of dinner parties and maybe not in a completely positive light. Is this intentional and Are you both fans of dinner parties?

EH
I have never been to a dinner party, and Jonathan has only been to a handful. I have certainly never held one. I live in a small grotty flat with a very small grotty kitchen that couldn’t cope with anything social. I also hate cooking. Dinner parties seem from a different world, to the one myself and Jonathan inhabit.

ET
The work is displayed and made in a such a way that the viewer wants to pick it up and touch it (at least I did) but obviously cannot. Was it made to have a tactile appeal?

EH
Through the use of disembodied body parts a physical sensation or equivalence in the viewer can be set off–when looking at a tongue you might experience your own. Also through the fact we normally touch things on a table, plates and napkins etc a sensual experience, beginning with touch, is offered. You are right, you can’t touch it, but hopefully you can feel it.

ET
Can you tell me a bit about how the show came about?

JB
As I said already Emma and I have wanted to work together on exhibition for some time. We recently got an exciting commission through PEER gallery, and the De La Warr Pavillion, Bexhill to work on an ambitious new work together. This was prior to our show at L’Etrangere, so when Emma got invited to show at the gallery she invited me to get involved too as an opportunity to test run how we work together and see if it in any way contributes to our forthcoming projects. For me it has been a real pleasure. During the install we agreed on all the decisions about the placement of objects and the arrangements of the show. Perhaps because at the core of if we love each others work so it was exciting to see each others work next to each other. The show has definitely proved that we make a great team and I’m really exciting about starting work together on our next project. Watch this space…

Review, Helen Sumpter / ARTREVIEW
Notes from the Orifice, (VITRINE Gallery, London.) Vol.66, no.9, December issue 2014, p.113

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.

Review, Kate Neave / TWIN Magazine 
Seductive Spaces; Four new art talents expand expectations of installation, issue 11, chapter 15, 2014

Jonathan Baldock creates installations with the mindset of a painter. Designing tableau-style compositions, he wants us to feel like we can step inside the picture frame. Having entered into his surreal landscape, he draws our eye to clusters of small sculptural constellations that are not quite what they seem. Objects that resemble archeological tools are in fact impractical and absurd. Strange handmade objects are everywhere, made from felt, sourdough and polystyrene. Filtering an interest in ancient artifacts, ritualism and tribal costumes, Baldock knits, sews, kneads and glues an imagined contemporary primitivism.

“I think the concept of craftsmanship and the ‘handmade’ has never been more relevant than it is today,” he says. “For too long, ideas associated with craft have been dismissed as sentimental and nostalgic.

I believe in the power of making things, and the bringing together of head and hand.” Baldock quotes Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s treatise on education, Émile, by way of explanation: “If, instead of making a child stick to his books, I employ him in a workshop, his hands work to the advantage of his intellect, he becomes a philosopher while he thinks he is simply becoming an artisan.”

It is Baldock’s talent for engaging the mind that makes his work so compelling. Handmade objects litter the ground like the cultural artifacts of a fantastical lost population. They invite us to imagine our own narrative. His sculptures become characters in stories drawn from our own thoughts.

Interview by Molly Taylor, October 2014
Elephant Magazine Online

Jonathan Baldock’s work presents the human as a built thing–an object sewn, stuffed and patch-worked together. His current show at VITRINE gallery in London is named after an essay on William Burroughs, and the writer’s ideas on escaping the body and language permeate the artists work. By taking the bodily hole as its key motif, ‘Notes from the Orifice’ considers the points at which the self tumbles into and entangles itself with the space that is in fact distinct from the self. And in the show, this space forms itself as colourful, crafted works that rely on the artist but from which he is crucially absent.

MT
‘Notes from the Orifice’ is the title of a 1985 essay by Robert Lydenberg on William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. Has this essay influenced your works, or did you notice thematic connections after you’d made them? 

JB
It wasn’t the essay that particularly influenced the exhibition, but the title. I had been reading Burroughs’ Naked Lunch–on which the essay was written–and was really interested in Burroughs’ fascination with the relationship between the physical body and mind, which is an ongoing investigation in my work. I had already considered the thematic connections between Burroughs’ work and mine in my previous solo at Chapter Gallery, Cardiiff, entitled ‘The Soft Machine’. As the title of the show specifically quotes Burroughs’ essay title, I thought it only right that I should credit him. Although living in the age of the Internet, we often don’t know, or forget, the source of the information we absorb.

MT
How does this exhibition at VITRINE relate to and expand upon your older work?

JB
This show is a continuation from my solo show at Chapter Gallery; Cardiff, entitled ‘The Soft Machine’ after the William Burroughs book. I aimed to draw a link via the title but also wanted to continue to explore the idea of the viewer stepping inside an artwork as an alternative reality. I am thinking about how an exhibition can make the visitor an essential part of the artwork, by choreographing their movements around the exhibition from their very first encounter of the show. I begin with the window on the street outside; visitors have to tiptoe or bend down to see the exhibition through the peepholes I have created through a wall sculpture in the window. To make the interior world, I chose light bright pastel colours that I hope will lull the viewer into a false sense of calm and cosy familiarity, that is then subverted on closer inspection: all is not quite as it seems. I will also be continuing my ongoing collaboration with artist and choreographer Florence Peake, whom I first worked with at Primary in Nottingham early this year, with a performance in the gallery on October 16th. Why do you think the orifice is particularly worthy of examination?

MT
A few years ago I made a series of salt-dough busts in which things were growing and sprouting from their noses, ears and mouths. Its been a recurring motif in my work and one with which I have considered throughout. What is my fascination with this part of the body? I sometimes wonder if it’s my complete inability to articulate myself with words. The mouth is a vessel, which suppresses expression rather than aids it. My mate Emma Hart did a show at Camden Arts Centre last year that dealt a lot with mouths as the link between inside and outside. It really resonated with me. We share a lot of concerns within our work, and she’s a great inspiration to me: one of my all time favourite artists. Next year we’re planning a big collaboration so watch this space.

JB
I have been making these hollow sculptures for a few years now, after a long running obsession with the work of Barbara Hepworth. My friend Kathy Noble actually also kept describing my hollow sculptures as orifices… It seemed right that the word should appear in the title of the show, as it was an aspect of my work that I wanted to explore further. I became more and more focused on ideas of the hole and what it meant for me. I started with hollow sculptures and then tried to translate this onto canvas with a series of “Orifice” paintings. It then struck me that Lucio Fontana had made the slash paintings, where he slashed holes in the canvas–hard angry gestures against traditional forms of painting and art history. I wondered if I could respond to that with meticulously stitched holes. In these orifice pictures you can see the skeleton (the frame) beneath.

For me the hole is the perfect metaphorical symbol of the portal separating two worlds–the inner reality and the outer reality. In terms of the human body the orifice is the only link between the inside and the outside.

MT
What place do aspects of traditional craft have in your work?

JB
I think the concept of craftsmanship and the ‘hand-made’ has never been more relevant than it is today. For too long, ideas associated with craft have been dismissed as sentimental and nostalgic. I believe in the power of making things, and the bringing together of head and hand. To make things by hand is not a mindless activity; a painter still paints with his hands. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s treatise on education Emile (1762), he writes of teaching teenagers a craft: “If, instead of making a child stick to his books, I employ him in a workshop, his hands work to the advantage of his intellect, he becomes a philosopher while he thinks he is simply becoming an artisan”.

As a society we are forced more and more to experience the world we live in virtually. The objects we encounter have been ordered online, or bought from huge supermarkets. We have no real idea how or where they were made. My work does not offer an escape from that but perhaps it allows time to process and understand better. My sculptures are performed in person–they are not prefabricated. For me making things by hand can be an almost meditative experience. It is an opportunity to think and imagine by oneself as opposed to having an experience projected on us.

MT
There are a few cases where the shapes in your installations and paintings look as though they could be ancient symbols. Is this intended?

JB
Coming from a painting background I realise the importance of how formal tropes of composition, such as colour and shape, affect a work’s reading. With some of the wall-based works I wanted to create forms that looked like a painterly action or gesture, but that also alluded to some sort of unidentifiable language. Language in its earliest, and most primitive, form started as a pictographic method of communication. As such, it was also significant that I played on this by creating marks akin to a type of hieroglyphic language–it was important for me that it seemed on some level familiar like a lost forgotten language without it actually being one. I think this gap between something alluding to something, without it actually becoming the ‘thing’ alluded to, is a very interesting space. It invites the viewer to fill in the gaps. It is something I play with a lot in my work–by making ceramic objects that are seemingly forgotten archaeological tools and performances that allude to having a narrative without actually having one. It is quite a difficult ground to tread, as it is so easy to automatically define something by what we know already.

Review, Alice Butler, 11.06.14

The Soft Machine

An inky scrawl, that just about reads ‘Z’, has been scratched across the book’s jacket in one feverish motion: a hieroglyphic structure that calls to mind the bending shape of Tatlin’s tower. This is the cover of the 1961 first edition of William Burroughs’s The Soft Machine. By 1966, the calligraphy had softened up, its forms curved as opposed to jagged; and by the time John Calder published it in Britain in 1968, the mood was all-out psychedelic. The changing covers of Burroughs’s novel reflect the flux state of its prose: the first three editions of The Soft Machine differ widely in their cut-up formations. His writing was in a constant state of assembly: as friends annotated dog-eared manuscripts; as printers dictated the arbitrary order of Naked Lunch (1959); and as the spiralling overspill from this abject book became the next three novels (The Soft Machine being the first of The Nova or Cut-up Trilogy), the process of making this verbal material was as frantic and bodily as how it felt to read it.

Jonathan Baldock’s eponymous installation, currently showing at Chapter in Cardiff, is similarly corporeal: a compartmentalization of bodily forms that gradually mutate from one to the next. A patchwork of sculpture, costume and objects, it is one work, like Burroughs’s ‘one’ novel, but it has been pieced together from a collage of cut-ups. Baldock’s ‘The Soft Machine’ (2014) makes a nod to its literary namesake in form, as seen in the stitched together fabric-fragments, but also in content. As Burroughs’s novel traces a peripatetic journey through time and place, crisscrossing through Mexico, Panama and the Mayan Empire, Baldock’s objects appear similarly archaeological, like the ‘Mayan artifacts and codices’ that moved through the brain of the novel’s narrator ‘like animated cartoons’. Over and above narrative setting, however, it is the human body –what Burroughs calls ‘soft night flesh’–that thematically links both artists. In novel and artwork, this material vessel is sculpted beyond recognition.

The novel features a changing cast of ‘Crab men’ and ‘Cannibal Trog Women’, and Baldock’s installation stars equally mad characters: the first one I meet is a stuffed, white and headless tribesperson, with a tubular torso and reeds sticking out of its head like a crown. It looks suspiciously like the cover illustration of the 1973 edition of the novel–robbed from Dali’s Metamorphosis of Narcissus–with its witchy digits shooting out of the ground, and egg balancing on top, giving birth to a daisy. Baldock’s felted metropolis is just as anthropomorphic: a world apart, where humans have been splintered and malformed, made into puppets of mythic fantasy. Many of these padded protagonists have been stripped of any familiar features, so what we are left with are mere suggestions, or extensions, of the human body: malleable and morphing, permeable prosthetics.

The environment is primal, with scatterings of mythic hand tools and woven masks interspersed with the androgynous creatures that use them. In Burroughs’s novel, the soft machine is a synonym for the human body invaded by synthetics and surveillance; in Baldock’s artwork, the soft machine corresponds to the corporeal triggers on show, with their intestinal pipes and organ-oblongs, and the materials from which they are made. Reminiscent of Marvin Gaye Chetwynd’s Rabelaisian happenings and homespun costumes, Baldock’s work is a soft and squidgy theatre-set for the uncensored. The word ‘soft’ invokes another meaning, however: one related to its source material and compound sculptures. We are in a space of pliable semantics, where syntax and language is multiple and hybrid. The ‘Soft Machine’ is fiction embodied; it is a space of imagination, and licentious narrative, whereby Baldock’s stitched circles and gaping orifices perform as thresholds into a storytelling space. It is not only Burroughs, nor Baldock, that is penning this dream: the viewer too, has the power to reconnect the pieces of the puzzle.

Stepping into Baldock’s sculptural village, he or she is met with an eclectic bunch of performers: a pair of elephantine habitants, downy and deflated, sit forlorn on the gallery floor, while wall-hugging nipples are more expectant. Arranged as one vast rainbow frieze, Baldock’s carnivalesque fantasy is close in spirit and structure to the costumes and stage-sets of Picasso’s ballet, Parade (1917), where the human body was carved into cubist mechanics. And in Baldock’s work, the human body is warped, extended out of itself, into the space of sculpture: the space of fiction. From the phallic spears strewn across the gallery floor, to vivisected stuffed arms, Baldock’s textile talismans are things to be played with an on: invitations to rule-break. Coming face-to-face with the inhabitants of the artist’s metropolis, the ‘carnival city’ of Burroughs’s novel, feels like a metaphor for Baldock’s artwork, feverishly scrawled.

Review, Dan Tucker, May 2014

Soft Machine, Quench Magazine, Issue 144, p. 34–35

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.

Review, Nick Warner, Jul-Aug 13

A strange cross between a butcher’s shop and a nightclub (Wysing Arts Centre), Art Monthly 368, p.30–31

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.

Interview with Lotte Juul Petersen, May 2013

A conversation between Jonathan Baldock and Lotte Juul Petersen, Curator, Wysing Arts Centre

I wanted to start by asking you about the television play Quad by Samuel Beckett, which you showed during your residency at Wysing. What attracted you to this play and how has it influenced ideas for your new works and ways of activating your sculptural works in the show?

The artist Emma Hart introduced me to the work during the residency. I had been thinking of ways I could introduce performance and interaction with my sculptural objects for a long time. Much of my practice references the human body in some way, so it really interested me to see how this could affect the work, and in turn how this could affect the audiences’ reaction and interpretation. I found Beckett’s Quad really fascinating because it articulates a space you can’t touch or see. It is less of a play and more of a dance with four robbed figures moving around a stage in a coordinated fashion. Whilst thinking about the idea of introducing performance I decided very early on that I didn’t want there to be a narrative, or for it to be an illustration of a play, text or song, instead focusing on a series of gestures and actions that were performed with the sculptural objects. In Quad, the cloaked figures repeat movements and this has a ritualistic and dark quality that also appealed to me. However, I think that whilst the Beckett piece definitely influenced part of the thinking process behind the performative element of the exhibition, the resulting collaboration with Henrietta Hale will be very different.

It has been really interesting to follow how you have researched and developed an approach that within your work naturally creates an interaction, for example some sculptural elements will function as both objects and bodily accessories. Could you tell more about the process and the actual making of these new sculptural works?

I came to the Wysing residency to explore the metaphorical idea of the forest environment in relation to the future/a return to nature/and transformation. This residency was a fantastic opportunity to have conversations and dialogue with the other artists-in-residence and the Wysing curators throughout the development of the work. Much of these discussions were the catalyst for the concept of the exhibition.

All the works in the exhibition are made by hand so that by their very nature they relate to the human body–the touch, shape and weight. In the case of the felt sculptures, each is entirely hand sewn, shaped and cut through a self-taught technique that does not rely on any of the traditional rules used by a tailor or dressmaker. No strict planning or pattern cutting is involved, so the process is very spontaneous and more like a collage in the way I assemble the sculptures. The work evolves slowly through cutting, pinning, and stitching.

It was my intention that everything in the exhibition had the potential to be picked up or held, and could be used within the performance. The ceramic and felt appliqué forms allude to a set function or purpose, but the material with which they are made defies this by its very nature. For example, the fragility and scale of the ceramic hand-tool sculptures means that they are implausible tools.

Since your time here at Wysing you have been to Shanghai and currently you are at the British School of Rome. In which ways when going to a completely different cultural context, has it been possible to test out new ideas for the show A strange cross between a butcher’s shop and a nightclub?

Although living in a state of flux over the past 9 months has been at times very stressful, it has also been incredibly important and useful. Since developing the idea to have a performative element to the Wysing exhibition I was able to test these ideas in collaboration with the German dance duo Rubato Dance Company in Shanghai. I came to them with the idea of making costumes for them to choreograph a performance in response to. My costumes were activated as a kind of sculptural painting through the physicality of dance, in order that they accumulate a history as objects in themselves. The pieces were made specifically for the dancers and were inspired in part by the costumes of traditional Chinese Opera. I wanted the costumes to allow freedom for play, and to function as objects that transform and mutate through dance. This experience was incredibly important to me as it was the first time I had collaborated with others, and so had to relinquish a certain amount of artistic control. Having no prior experience of working in the medium of dance we decided that Jutta Hell would take on the choreography of the performance. I was incredibly pleased with the resulting performance at the Rockbund Art Museum, however I realised that I wanted to have much more involvement in my collaboration with Henrietta Hale. Rather than a polished performance I would like the process and development of the work to hold equal importance–hence the open weekend of the 6/7th July working in the gallery space with Henrietta and keeping it open to an audience.

My time in Rome has been much more reflective and provided an opportunity to process ideas and experiences whilst thinking about how to make them coherent in the exhibition. I love the title A strange cross between a butcher’s shop and a nightclub–it somehow suggest a fictive and implausible space. In your works there are many subtle references to literature, film, and pagan rituals, archaeological materials, the carnivalesque and theatre, could you tell a bit about your inspirational materials.

The title of the show is actually a statement J.G.Ballard used in his 1991 BBC documentary to describe his vision of the dissecting room whilst studying medicine at Kings College, Cambridge. It was such an unlikely visual connection, but seemed so absurdly descriptive. On many levels it seemed an apt title for the exhibition, as I had been reading Ballard during my research at Wysing, and then moved to Shanghai to complete the residency. Shanghai was in fact Ballard’s birthplace and the city that informed so much of his work, so he had been a constant presence in the production of the show. In the statement Ballard links two very different locations through referencing the human body. This is something that really resonates in my own practice as I like to draw unlikely parallels and connections together from very different references and one of the main ways in which I do this is through the human form.

Much of the sculpture in the exhibition is inspired by very disparate sources. The larger monolithic sculptures quote the monuments of Stonehenge whilst also looking to the modernist sculpture of Barbara Hepworth. This same sculpture is made through a process of appliqué–stitching together a skin-tight fabric over forms and giving them a very human/bodily presence. The resulting hand-made fabric skin is both a mask and mimicry of the surface of stone, but also a costumed character on an open stage, about to perform.

In my work I try to weave together many different references and make subtle nods to them in the work. I love the idea that the works can be interpreted in different ways and to different levels of intensity. Usually a work starts with a single idea which by the end this is often almost completely abstracted. In this manner I try to avoid any sense of narrative. The pieces must work independently as well as together in an installation. It’s important that they have a conversation.

Review, Claudine Ise, October 2011

Pierrot, Artforum, 10.09.11–11.06.11 Peregrine Program, Critics Picks Jonathan Baldock

The clown–a source of laughter for some and of unease or even terror for others–is the central motif in Jonathan Baldock’s sculptural installation Pierrot, 2011, which takes its title and inspiration from Jean-Antoine Watteau’s 1718–19 painting of a commedia dell’arte fool. Standing alone above his fellow actors, Watteau’s Pierrot appears lost in thought, the expression on his unpainted face remote. In this moment, he seems unable to fully inhabit his persona–perhaps he is a man forced to play a part that stopped making sense long ago. Baldock’s version of the Pierrot figure evokes a similar sense of displacement, albeit in a comically literal fashion: The clown’s costumed body has been abstracted into a series of modular geometric forms that the artist can (and does) reconfigure at will. Baldock sculpts the individual components out of polysterene foam, then blanket-stitches sections of cream-colored felt directly onto the forms, forming a taut sheath over the entirety of each. On top of this are sewn additional fabric cutouts in the shape of tears, body parts, polka dots, and stripes.

When viewed as an installation, the sculptures yield a single, exquisitely balanced visual tableau. Seen as individual works, however, their affects career wildly from humorous to bawdy to downright creepy. A head placed atop a stack of cylindrical and rectangular forms evokes a clown in jauntily striped pantaloons, yet the bullet-size hole where one of his eyes should be, and the scarlike strip of black fabric running down the jawline, conjure far less comforting imagery. Comparisons to Frankenstein’s monster and his slasher-film offspring are inevitable, but equally resonant is David Wojnarowicz’s 1990 Silence = Death and its iconic image of a man with his mouth sewn shut, blood running from the sutures like tears. For the most part, Baldock avoids pinning any one cultural or art-historical reference to his sculptures, preferring instead to allow for a potentially infinite number of them. A torso with outstretched arms, for example, suggests the graceful leaps of a dancer en pointe, while the crudely suggestive smiley face appliquéd to its chest reminds us that “low” forms of culture offer modes of levity that are just as powerful as “high” culture. What is a clown, after all, if not a man who can show us the potential for transcendence that lies in both?

Interview with Francesco Scasciamacchia, March–April 2010

Brand New Jonathan Baldock, Flashart International, Flash Art 271

FRANCESCO SCASCIAMACCHIA: In the Commedia dell’ arte, professional players acted with masks. In your work the mask recurs as autonomous sculpture along with other elements to create an installation. What’s the semantic significance of the mask for you? JB: The mask is a mode of transformation. In theater it can be a representation of something grotesque, beautiful, good or bad, but it can also be simply a means of disguise. A smiling exterior could be a disguise for something much more sinister–beauty unmasks the horrific. It is the infamous image of juxtaposed comedy and tragedy masks. I love the duality that masks symbolize, which feeds a lot of my practice. As human beings we are inherently both good and evil. We are conflicting and opposing forces, mind and body, and the mask expresses this rather well. I enjoy this tension and ruminate on this. A lot of my work is inspired by classical figurative sculpture. I take elements of the past and transform them into something of the present. Also, the ‘mask’ is a universally understood symbol that transcends cultures–it is theater, more visual than verbal.

FS
Do you think that the only way to get away from customs of painting is putting them into an “installative” dimension? Is this a prerogative in your work?

JB
In addition to sculpture and installation, my practice also includes painting. I come from there; often painting informs what I do. In recent work I have not so much tried to get away from the customs of painting as to enhance the link between painting and sculpture. I am really interested in this idea that the two support each other in their unifi cation. I think painting is as relevant and important now as it has always been. Its high art status is particularly interesting to me when sitting alongside the everyday, craft materials that I use to make my sculptures.

FS
I saw you sewing your puppets, primping your masks. It’s like watching a costume designer.
Can you imagine a storyline or narrative element while you work?

JB
The nature of embroidery and sewing means that a certain amount of planning is involved. However, I usually arrive at the finished work rather organically. I do not use patterns or templates for the sewn elements, and the whole process is usually led by a lot of making, editing and seeing what “fi ts.” I don’t imagine a storyline or narrative element in the work, but I do like the idea that each work has its own personality or character, and that they in turn have a relationship with each other. Whether it is a painting or sculpture, I am always looking for ways with which to inject life into them. For example adding hair or eyes to a work gives it an uncanny ability to perform and become alive–therefore allowing the work to touch on the defining questions of existence itself.

Jonathan Baldock was born in 1980 in Pembury (UK). He lives and works in London. Selected solo shows: 2008: Backlit Studios, Nottingham; FAS, London. 2006: Meals and SUVs, London. Selected group shows: 2010: “NEWSPEAK: British Art Now,” The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg/Saatchi Gallery, London. 2009: “O/A Stiff New Speak: Bandeau,” Tricycle Arts Centre, London. Francesco Scasciamacchia is Flash Art Italia news editor.

Review, Claire Flannery, May 2010

Jonathan Baldock’s The Fool’s Flipside Through to 6th June 2010 at Cell Project Space, FAD website

As a giant procrastinator I sympathise with those who let things pass them by. Although, let’s face it, in London blinkers are a necessity to maintain a certain level of sanity. A big caveat to this however is missing out on the once offs. Like the burgeoning beginnings of a bright career. Like Jonathan Baldock’s. There are so many ingredients to the consensus of success that it can all too easily slip by the way side. Something tells me this won’t happen in Baldock’s case. With just 8 days left till Baldock’s first solo exhibition since he graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2005 is dismantled and packed away, this is a call to action.

His funky colourful hand crafted sculptures, mostly busts and figures, are a blend of references from Comedie del’Arte to Henry Moore’s reclining figures to contemporary sci-fi without being, to use that awful word, in any way derivative. They are unsettling to some, ‘darkly humourous’ according to the blurb. I imagine having one in your house staring at you through those freaky dolls eyes could well be disturbing, but in general the atmosphere at Cell Project Space is not so dark, more curious. Together perhaps, the works nomalize each other. Isolated they’d react differently.

The paintings are really interesting too and sufficiently different to the sculptures to show that he understands the mediums in their own terms. This makes the works sound conventional or conservative somehow and me too but they are not, I‘m not. That said, what I do like is the lack of force that is so often present in contemporary art, where it seems artists expect their work to have an edge before it has even had a chance to form at all. Baldock’s exhibition seems to me at least to be a very substantial marker in an unrushed and ongoing path. Focused yet very open and inventive.

I really don’t want to give too much away. Nothing worse than too much of a low down before you have had a chance to think about how and when you can get to the little gallery near Vyner Street in Bethnal Green. It is quite hidden, so be warned. Ok, you know what the message is–go see it.

Claire Flannery runs Artfeelers art tours – www.artfeelers.com, Link to the article