Jonathan Baldock: Touch Wood

23 Sep 2023-7 Jul 2024

Becoming a Plant (a hop), 2023. Credit: Photo by Mark Blower

Overview

Jonathan Baldock is a British artist who works across sculpture, installation and performance. His work is saturated with humour and wit, as well as an uncanny, macabre quality that channels his longstanding interest in myth and folklore. These fabled worlds intersect with an exploration of the possibilities for alternative queer realities and histories. Baldock often uses biographical forms – such as casts of his face, feet or hands – to consider our relationship to the body and the space it inhabits, addressing related themes of stress, trauma, sensuality and mortality. For YSP, he will create new work that takes inspiration directly from the site, and rural crafts and industries entwined with it, as well as from his own working- class roots and connections to farming.

Baldock exploits the material contrasts between ceramic and textile, often disrupting and removing the functional qualities of these media. Elements of theatre and ritual are woven throughout his immersive installations. Baldock has used sewing, wool spinning, plant dyeing and basket weaving techniques in his work to date. Departing from ancient craft traditions, these methods weave Baldock’s personal stories into a poignant investigation of material and memory.

Artists