Jonathan Baldock: Touch Wood

Baldock has a deep-rooted affinity to nature as he hails from generations of hop-gatherers and gardeners who have had a physical, emotional and sustaining relationship with the land. At the centre of the gallery are four textile panels, each representing a different season, and hung in a circle to create a distinct, jewel-like space in the heart of the room. From the paler pastel shades of spring to the rusty tones of autumn, they capture the natural rhythms of a year. Embroidered onto each panel are designs inspired by sacred geometry – the shapes and growth patterns found throughout the natural world that connect all living things. Other textile hangings will form columns in the gallery, suggesting ecclesiastical architecture yet celebrating the earthly seasons. 

‘Kiss from a Rose’ toys with the Christian conceptions of Christ’s body; its human form, its transfiguration in communion, and its resurrection. These themes echo the aesthetics of the nearby Wakefield Cathedral, including the bawdy imagery common in the Medieval era, even in sacred spaces. Comically pink buttocks and a pair of paint splattered feet burst from the church-like structure. A chrome dipped rose blooms from between the buttocks; a playful and strikingly beautiful thwarting of the cuboid’s clean lines. The church appears to have sprouted body parts: an absurdist reimagining of one of the most powerful authorities in British history. Baldock’s ceramic works often feature casts of his and his loved one’s faces and body parts. Here, the slick grey cube decorated with buttocks and feet is humorously made bodily.

Casts of the artist’s own face and body parts, as well as those of his mother and partner, feature as flower heads and fragmented appendages attached to, or emerging from, ceramic vessels. Their inclusion binds them together within objects that celebrate the presence of the maker, human relationships, how we hold onto people, and queer love. The ceramics also link to the carvings in Wakefield Cathedral, with one work hinting at a Green Man that has two faces like Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and doorways, who is represented with one face looking backwards and one forwards. Baldock features his own face on one side of a flower and his mother’s on the other, inextricably linking them in one moment in time at the threshold of the past and the future. Filling the gallery is a sound work that draws on and melds together the myriad themes and motifs of the show. It features samples of Gregorian chants, medieval and folk songs, recordings of plants growing and birdsong.