Acorn cups, pinecones, seedheads, a fallen petal, frayed leaves, feathers, empty shells, a marbled pebble.

A list of childhood treasures scooped up and surreptitiously stowed in bulging pockets. These precious finds could also fit in the palm of a hand, much like the enticing objects encountered in Jonathan Baldock’s exhibition For Your Keeping. His engorged biomorphic vessels, ceramic flower heads and patterned textiles fashioned from sacred geometry, replete with unruly body parts, have grown from seeds first planted as a child – from a world in which a five-year-old Baldock carefully crafted the likeness of his mother from a clod of garden soil, nestling this precocious gift in his small palm.

Baldock’s world (like the crook of his hand) has since grown wider, cradling ever more complexity. Yet his making remains tethered to the earthy enclave of his mother’s garden, with sepals and stamens brought to life by human hand. Careful stitches count time barely containing escaping limbs, shaped from the roughened textures of natural materials such as hessian and clay, and faces and unexpected gestures form from the twist or turn of a hand. There is an immediacy to these works in which the artist’s presence is never far away.

In Baldock’s recent exhibition Held we are reminded gently of the need to hold, to connect, to nourish, to nurture. Here we are invited not only to hold, but to hold closer, and unlike his previous invitations this is not a temporary act of connection, instead he is bestowing us a gift imbued with permanence – these works are for our keeping. But as is often the case with Baldock’s work there is a tension at play; is this an act of encouragement to cherish, or a knowing wink, reminding us of our innate human need to collect, to contain, to possess.

The collectability of these works is evoked in part by scale. Baldock has often been drawn to extremes. From monumental creatures, like Bear Hug’s monstrous hind or Mother Flower’s snaking roots; to the small hidden grimaces of Misericords brought to life in a queer world of the artist’s making in Touch Wood; and the dainty bells of his mother’s favourite flora transformed into giant dangling flower heads in 0.1%. Previously these larger-than-life forms inhabited immersive worlds, enveloping and inviting us in, whereas now his cast of diminutive creatures beckon and gesture with quiet whispers, beseeching us to step closer, as we peer into the undergrowth to reveal an unsettling horticultural cabinet of curiosities.

Although small in stature compared to their ancestors, the works' scale is akin to the space in which they sit. The white stuccoed cornices and elegant mantles of Bloomsbury Place provide an apt backdrop for this new interaction. There is a theatricality in this quiet domesticity which conjures up memories of miniature gardens made from moss and found foliage, or of homemade dioramas and the encapsulation of a whole world found inside a perfectly proportioned cardboard box. This is a new form of world building for Baldock.

These works also invite a physical intimacy. To experience them we must manoeuvre our bodies, edging closer, eyes widened (and with good reason). For as we lean in a grotesque humour gurgles back with a rawness both disturbing and beguiling. In Pax we are eyeballed by a singular piercing blue eye, encircled by hessian and felt petals; elsewhere in Snoutflower two perfect pink ceramic ears appear at first glance to be a snuffling animal snout; and in Small Devotion a fleshy pink tongue, grooved and dimpled, pokes out from within a sea of writhing pink and blue tipped pistils, its tentacles greedily grasping for space. Ears and noses and lips jut and distend creating strangely erotic orifices from which to delve inside and explore the botanical origins within. Wherever we look the body – or body parts – are never far away, merging and metamorphosing with nature’s own. This hybridity imbues these silent objects with a pulsating sense of life: fronds whisper, flowerheads wink and empty vessels bulge and bellow. As we move between we almost become aware of an uneasy rustling breeze licking and listening at the edges of this ripening garden, a haven for disobedient flesh and fauna.

Experience as something we can only ever feel in relation to our own bodies is not lost on Baldock. Whereas once his towering green men and folkloric figures may have dwarfed, now it is us that looms. This reversal of vulnerability asks us to do the holding – a tenderness ingrained in even the most obscene of his hybrid creatures. This sense of fragility circles us back to that childhood garden, where cycles of death and decay, germination and new growth linger in the fecund soil. Ever aware of his and our mortality, we are asked to consider what it is that we wish to possess or keep close. For Baldock this is partly answered by revealing the owners – when not his own – of the various protruding body parts, which here have been lovingly cast from his partner and mother (just as he did as a child).

As containers of bodies we might also explore the idea that Baldock’s works are in some way both possessing and holding. Religious ritual – fertile ground for Baldock with its overlapping intersectionality of class and sexuality – springs to mind, and in particular the sacred harbouring of physical objects such as reliquaries, which in Medieval times encased bodily fragments in caskets or forms bearing likeness to the body. As we remember that here in For Your Keeping these are not works to walk around but to be turned over in the hand, smaller devotional objects such as effigies and prayer beads also spring to mind. It is this emotional charge, latent within objects that have frequently been touched or held close to the body that Baldock is interested in exploring further. Perhaps he is asking us the viewer to perform a type of psychoscopic object reading and decipher for ourselves the meaning within, or a reprisal of his Winnicottian* fascination with childhood objects and toys – like a blanket or soft toy, which are also held close – used to bridge the gap between the inner world of fantasy and the outer world of reality.

For his part, Baldock describes these works as ‘votive’ offerings, shaped by the ancient pre-Christian act of leaving an object in a sacred space for the gods. Here, laying bare his own faith in nature through the fleshy flora and fauna that watch and listen as we make our own way around the gallery, Baldock is making an offering to us – a gift to remember someone or something by; perhaps our own humanity. It is this we are asked to hold and to carry, to retain, to store, to preserve, to garner, to possess, to keep.

– Gemma Brace, Head of Exhibitions, Arnolfini, Bristol 

 

*Donald Winnicott (1896-1971) was a British psychoanalyst whose work focused on child development and parenting and pioneered the idea of the holding environment. His work has influenced Baldock’s own thinking around the idea of ‘transitional objects’.