Jonathan Baldock: Review Done – Lick Me, Trap Me, Drag Me In | art

ASpread arms, clasped hands, puckered lips: everything in Jonathan Baldock’s strange, uncomfortable and bizarre exhibition of furnishings and ceramics at Bristol’s Arnolfini Gallery reaches out to you. The entire exhibition is an invitation to an exhibition, or perhaps its embrace is a threat, a violent trap.

Here the English artist has created a tense world of folk psychedelia and pagan aesthetics. Don’t read any of the stammering on the wall, it’s written in nice, lightly medicated language about “radical gestures” and “making room for queer and working-class stories.” It doesn’t fit the show. That’s not to say it’s not about weirdness and working class, because it certainly is. It’s just that this isn’t nice and soft art, it’s weird and threatening and menacing – and that’s why it’s so good.

You walk in and feel as if you have stumbled upon a chaotic rural ritual, one in which you might be invited to place one of the wheat masks on the wall and participate in it, or find yourself bound like a sacrifice. Two life-sized figures greet you as you enter, their robes decorated with leaves and greenery. The pink holes at crotch level indicate that these robes serve other purposes as well. On the walls, ceramic flowers grew noses and ears, and a tongue stuck out from the center of a gray poppy, trying to lick you as you passed. Hands reach desperately out of ceramic pots onto the floor, as if the bodies are trapped inside, or they’re trying to pull you in.

You have to go outside to escape this magical pagan world where nature has come back to life. But you escape into the next room and then the smell hits you: a pungent smell of fur and wood and wet moss. A deep bass sound echoes through the space, the sound of branches snapping and some creatures breathing. It could all come from that giant bear on a platform in the middle of the room. It could be his breath that you hear, or the musk that you breathe. You are invited to climb up and embrace it, to be embraced by its huge arms. Take off your shoes, and wrap yourself around them. He doesn’t feel comfortable, and he doesn’t feel safe. Will it contain you, or will it tear you apart?

This is the central tension of the show: it’s all about the friction between care and violence, between love and rejection. All of these images of paganism and rural psychedelia come back to Baldock as he tries to understand the England to which he belongs—genetically and ancestrally—but he cannot truly feel part of the culture and gender.

This is the thing about tribalism, about communities. You are either in or out, accepted or rejected, and everything here feels torn between the two.

it’s great. Really great. Baldock’s work is intensely personal, and there are references throughout to his mother, to her support of his career, and to her delightful English garden. There are nods to sexuality and the body, to English history and Japanese culture. Faces pout from pots, flowers grow from anuses. The walls are covered with tapestries filled with geometric patterns, images of bodies and teeth, trees of life, Celtic knots, English roses, ancient engravings, and green men. It’s amazing, surreal, aggressive.

It’s an unsettling and menacing offering, not helped by the eerie ambient soundtrack, which makes you feel like you’re about to be pounced on by a mythical beast in a deep, dark forest. There’s a sense here of ancient ritual viewed through the lens of 1960s hippie love, interspersed with the grind of millennial malaise. It’s as if Wicker Man didn’t exist on an island off the coast of northwest Scotland, but rather in the early 2000s in semi-rural Kent. A more terrifying, uncomfortable and somewhat sinister prospect.