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Arms spread, hands clasped, lips parted: Everything Jonathan Baldock presents, the unsettling, wonderful art and ceramics at Bristol’s Arnolfini is coming to you. The entire show is an invitation to action, or perhaps its embrace is threatening, a violent trap.
The English artist created a complex world of folkloric psychedelia and pagan aesthetics here. Don’t read anything on the wall, it’s couched in calm and simple terms about “powerful visuals” and “having a place for abstract and working-class stories”. It doesn’t fit the show. Not that this isn’t about queerness and the working class, because it absolutely is. It’s just that this isn’t quiet and soft art, it’s weird and scary and scary – and that’s why it’s so good.
You’re walking and it’s as if you’ve stumbled upon a deranged village ritual, a ritual in which you’ll either be asked to wear a single wheat mask on the wall and participate, or find yourself stuck as a sacrifice. Two giant figures greet you as you enter, their robes adorned with leaves and greenery. The pink holes at crotch level indicate that these robes serve other purposes as well. On the walls, ceramic flowers grow noses and ears, a tongue sticks out from among the gray poppies, trying to lick you as you walk. Hands reach desperately for earthen pots on the floor, as if bodies are trapped inside, or trying to pull you away.
You have to get out, escape this magical alien world where the universe has come alive. But you run into the next room and the smell hits you: the acrid smell of wool and wood and wet moss. The sound of deep bass in the air, the sound of branches snapping and the breathing of animals. It could all be from that bear on the platform in the middle of the room. It could be his breath that you smell, his musk that you breathe in. You are invited to climb up and embrace them, embraced by his big arms. Take off your shoes, wrap them around his legs. It doesn’t feel good, it doesn’t feel safe. Will it catch you, or will it cut off your leg?
That’s the central conflict of the show: it’s all about care and violence, between love and rejection. All these images of paganism and rural psychedelia come down to Baldock trying to create an idea of England where he comes from – naturally, parents – but he cannot feel that he is part of the culture, sex.
That’s the thing about the nation, about the communities. You are in or you are out, accepted or rejected, and everything here seems to be torn between the two.
It’s great. Really successful. Baldock’s work is very personal, there are references to his mother everywhere, helping him in his work, in his pleasant English garden. There are ideas about sexuality and bodies, in English history and Japanese culture. Little faces from pots, flowers come out of anuses. The walls are covered with tapestries full of geometric patterns, figures of bodies and teeth, trees of life, Celtic knots, English flowers, ancient texts and green men. It’s dizzying, surreal, aggressive.
This is a haunting, scary scene, never ending with an amazing ambient soundtrack, that makes you feel like you’re about to be hit by a mythical monster in the darkest forest. There is a sense here of the old traditions seen in the 1960s hippy romance, and passing through the millennial malaise. It is as if the Wicker Man was not set on an island in the northwest of Scotland, but in the early 2000s in Kent. A very scary, unpleasant and terrible prospect.
