Inscape Gordon Baldwin
Inscape
Gordon Baldwin
Gordon Baldwin
Inscape
White Vessel with Six Holes
Earthenware
46 x 46 x 19 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
I Think I Hear A Shakuhachi
Charcoal on paper
52 x 64 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Foreword
1950s
1960s
Gordon Baldwin, Potter and Poet by Anthony Gardner
1970s 1980s
1990s
2000s
Gordon of Clay by Helen Walsh
2010s
Afterword
Testimonials
Collections Credits
Acknowledgements
Image Credits
Vessel for a Sculptor I
x 20.5 x 12 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Gordon Baldwin is a pivotal figure in the history of British modernism and his pioneering use of organic forms, their captivating asymmetry and textured surfaces redefined the potential of clay as a medium. “Gordon Baldwin: Inscape” captures his life’s work by connecting his sculptural practice to his poetry and drawing.
In Baldwin’s exploration of the Vessel as both a form and a negative space, his poetry resonates with a profound awareness of embodiment and relationality. The Vessel, as structure and metaphor, delineates an inner space with a sense of place and shelter, but also an absence, an openness, and the void that shapes its form. This duality is mirrored in Baldwin’s interpretation of the world: simultaneously vivid and elusive, “felt” yet uncertain. His language carries the weight of inhabiting spaces that both reveal and obscure meaning, much like the Vessel’s interplay of in- and outside.
In Baldwin’s poetics, the Vessel draws upon “the inscape,” a term coined by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, where the essence of a thing or being is not fixed but perceived in its inner dynamic: pulsing, shifting, tangled, and tethered at different intensities to its surroundings. In Baldwin’s work, the self is adrift as a point of encounter between interiority and a vast, shifting landscape, oscillating between grounding and disorientation, between inhabiting and being exposed to the world. The Vessel is the body of the porous boundary between the meeting of this internal and external reality, inviting reflection upon how to sense and articulate the self in relation to others, to space, and to the unknowable.
Milan Ther
Ceramic and Drawings
Gordon Baldwin was born and grew up in Lincoln. He attended the local art school and there he met his future wife, Nancy. Baldwin studied painting but elected pottery as the course’s craft option. He had an early interest in literature and wanted to write, dreaming of being a poet. In 1951, Baldwin went on to study Industrial Ceramics at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. The Central School was an environment of great flexibility and variety, within which Baldwin developed a distinctly sculptural style. The Bauhaus-inspired Basic Design course saw students taught across multiple disciplines by teachers such as Dora Billington, William Turnbull and Eduardo Paolozzi. The course encouraged students to think beyond any preconceived confines of their medium and to develop as true artists.
The works from this decade demonstrate a keen sense of experimentation and a breadth of expression that encompassed functional pottery, figurative sculpture and abstract forms. As many potters do, Baldwin began by making functional works, largely in the style of Bernard Leach. A tall vase from 1951 (page 12) bears a resemblance to Leach’s famed ‘Leaping Salmon’ vase that Baldwin would later select for his “Excitations” exhibition at York Art Gallery in 2012. A number of Baldwin’s early pottery pieces, teacups and matching saucers share aesthetic similarities with later works: for example, we find a dark criss-crossed decoration which becomes a recurring motif on the surfaces of his pots
from the 1990s. Distinctly painterly, his decorating style recalls Baldwin’s previous training and aspirations as a painter and anticipates his paintings “in the form of a bowl” of later years.
In complete contrast to these are a number of boldly expressionist, abstract figurative forms that are more akin to post-war modern British sculpture. In the wake of the Second World War, a group of sculptors, including Baldwin’s tutors at Central, William Turnbull and Eduardo Paolozzi, manifested a certain existential anxiety in works that came to be described as the Geometry of Fear. In a similar manner, Baldwin’s sculptures teeter on a border between the anthropomorphic and the animalistic. They have a totemic quality, like indecipherable lost symbolic forms. The works are slab and hand-built, clay brought together thickly and with distinct weight into rounded geometric assemblages; forms balance on stilted limbs, surfaces deeply carved and gouged. Like the sculptures by his teachers, these works have an uneasy ambiguity, compounded when considered alongside the thrown teacups and saucers the artist was making at the same time, and serve to reject any functional association.
In 1957 Baldwin was appointed Pottery Teacher at Eton College. Eton’s students benefitted from a wellappointed studio and a very encouraging view of the creative arts from the school. Baldwin approached his students at Eton very much as he taught his older
students at the Central School and always worked on his sculptures while teaching. Included here are a number of wall-mounted crucifixes for Eton College that still hang in their Lower Chapel.
At a similar time, Baldwin met collector and gallerist Henry Rothschild, likely whilst Baldwin was supervising the ‘Prehistory to Picasso’ exhibition at Goldsmiths. A group from the college were offered an exhibition at Primavera, Rothschild’s gallery on Sloane Street, London in 1961, at which Baldwin sold a number of works to the Inner London Education Authority who toured artworks around local schools. Baldwin recalls a turbulent relationship with the gallerist, recounting unexplained periods of little to no communication but describes an eventual life-long friendship, crediting Rothschild as his number one fan. Of Primavera, Baldwin describes a place unlike any other, a meeting place for artists to share ideas. Rothschild bought many of Baldwin’s works for his own collection, now part of the Shipley Gallery. Baldwin recalls, ‘if Henry said it was good that was quite an accolade … it was used like currency’ (Janine Barker, Henry Rothschild and Primavera: The retail, exhibition and collection of craft in post-war Britain, 1945-1980, 2015).
Cup and Saucer 1954
Earthenware
Cup: 7.6 x 12.5 x 10.4 cm, Saucer: 2.8 x 16 cm
Victoria and Albert Museum
Lion Plate 1951
Terracotta
30 cm diameter
Baldwin Family Collection
Tall Vase early 1950s
Earthenware
30.5 x 10 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Untitled circa 1950s
Mixed media on board
22 x 22 cm
Collection of J S F Pode
Bowl 1954
Stoneware
37 cm diameter
Gordon Baldwin Archive
Earthenware 7.6 x 12.8 x 10.4 cm
Victoria and Albert Museum
Number 15, The Architecture of a Legend 1957
Oil on board
73 x 56 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Figure 1957
Ceramic
50 cm high
Crispin Kelly Collection
The Thames Valley 1959
35 x 60 cm
Collection of J S F Pode
Untitled 1957
Earthenware 15 cm high
Figure 1957–58
Earthenware
75 x 43 cm
Victoria and Albert Museum
Maquette 1958
Ceramic
23 cm high
Gordon Baldwin Archive
Charcoal
Earthenware
Earthenware
Head of a Japanese Warrier
Untitled
Helmet Head
Untitled 1957
Earthenware 25 cm high
Earthenware 55 cm high Head
circa late 1950s Metal 18 x 13 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Sculpture 1958 Ceramic 38 cm high
Gordon Baldwin Archive
The Watcher 1959
Wall Cross сirca 1959
Earthenware
35.6 x 21.6 x 2.7 cm
Eton College Collections
Wall Cross сirca 1959
Earthenware
37.9 x 21.9 x 3.4 cm
Eton College Collections
Wall Cross сirca 1959
Earthenware
36 x 21 x 2.8 cm
Eton College Collections
Wall Cross сirca 1959
Earthenware
30.6 x 21.5 x 33 cm
Eton College Collections
Wall Cross сirca 1959
Earthenware
34.8 x 21.2 x 33 cm
Eton College Collections
Reclining Figure
circa 1960
Ceramic with wooden base
16.5 x 30 x 15 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Ceramic and Drawings
In the early 1960s, a series of Watcher-like figures perpetuate the post-war Geometry of Fear aesthetic of the previous decade. Armless biomorphic sculptures have recognisable torso and head forms, yet the reduced anatomy gives them a totemic distance, a sense of the unknowable.
Baldwin experiments with different materials throughout the 60s, producing sculptures in aluminium, bronze and even wood, that now only exist in photographs in the artist’s archive. Even Baldwin’s treatment of clay, the deeply scoured and pitted surfaces, reflect the anxiety of post-war artists. For Baldwin, this approach clarifies his attitude towards clay: to reject the smooth surface and symmetrical forms of thrown and functional works, and stake claims for ceramic as a purely sculptural material. His commitment to clay was challenged during a meeting with gallerists McRoberts & Tunnard. After seeing black and white photographs of the artist’s work, Baldwin recalls an exchange on his use of clay: ‘one of them said “what are they made of?”, because in the ‘60s it could have been bronze […] and I said, “well they’re ceramics”. “Oh my God” he said “they’re pots! Now, we’re interested in your work, but you’ll have to have it cast into bronze” […] and I remembered that for years, you know, that idea that unless it went into… can we call it fine art material, and pottery was not, that was it. So, my debut into the West End didn’t happen” (Barker, 2015).
The importance of Baldwin’s sculptural approach is applicable also to the vessel-like forms of the 1960s, including planters, plates, jugs and bottles; coloured and textured, these were often hand-altered thrown or moulded forms. The works have an aesthetic closeness to other masters of studio pottery, for example the sgraffito vessels by Lucie Rie, but conceptually feel like a first step into Baldwin’s later interrogations of the vessel form. Baldwin unifies form and surface decoration asserting the object-ness of the vessel, its place as a singular sculpture. The longevity of the vessel theme within Baldwin’s oeuvre is testament to the importance of these early pots in their connection to Baldwin’s early sculptures, despite aesthetic dissimilarity to later works.
One series of vessels appear as if constructed from two fused slabs of clay, inflated with life and form to stand upright. Some of these pots are titled Torso (page 27 and 32), and thus offer a bridge between body and pot - a connection which is perpetuated throughout the ceramic continuum. Through this, Baldwin takes a first step into the conceptualisation of the vessel form and the construction of meaning around formal attributes in drawing attention to the space between forms and creating an interior and exterior, whether a literal association with physiology or a symbolic connection with psychology.
In the latter half of the decade, Baldwin abandons his highly textured vessels and figurative forms, moving towards a geometric abstraction rendered in a matt or gloss black glaze. Formally these have more in common with the artist’s now lost sculptures in aluminium and wood: assemblages of geometric forms that come together in a singular structure, made whole by the deep black glaze. There is a sense of intuition and instinct in Baldwin’s bringing together of simple disparate shapes and an economy of form that mirrors his interest in contemporary music. For composers like John Cage and Xenakis, and experimental artists such as Takis, the silences are as important as the melody and the form is given space to affect the environment around it; Baldwin channels their sense of distilled expression. When viewed en masse, the sculptures seem almost like a pictographic alphabet, each a glyph of singular morphology with some now lost meaning. Singularly they could be maquettes for larger sculptures or scaled down architectural models. Similarly, Baldwin’s titles become less obviously descriptive: titles like Slow Move, Egyptian Black and Seascape (page 21 and 33) are suggestive but appear to bear little relevance to the formal qualities of the work. They are rather more like surrealist labels that perhaps allow insight into the artist’s perception but not in any easy or obvious way.
Earthenware
Egyptian Black 1968
72 x 71 x 10 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection
/ York Museums Trust
A Large Bowl on Foot
circa 1960s
Stoneware
14 x 20.5 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Earthenware
39.8 x 52.2 cm
Usher Gallery, Lincoln
A Small Bowl on Foot circa 1960s
Stoneware
7.5 x 11 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Untitled Object 1960
Earthenware
32 x 39 cm
Usher Gallery, Lincoln
Object for an Unknown Ritual 1960
Earthenware
33 x 38 x 13 cm
Usher Gallery, Lincoln
Totem
1960-1969
Earthenware
47 x 27 x 19 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Turning Figure circa 1960
Cold coated bronze
25 x 45 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Untitled 1960-1969
Earthenware
23 x 10.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Untitled 1960-1969
Earthenware
21.5 x 11 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Untitled 1960-1969
Earthenware
7.5 x 37.5 x 27 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Untitled 1960-1969
Earthenware
5 x 35 x 27.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Untitled circa 1960s
Earthenware
20 x 12 cm
Collection of J S F Pode
Untitled 1960-1969
Earthenware
7 x 45.5 x 37 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Blue Platter circa 1960s
Earthenware
7 x 34 cm
Collection of J S F Pode
Pot 1960
Earthenware 22 x 17 cm
Collection of J S F Pode
Untitled circa 1960s
Stoneware
2.4 x 25 cm each
Eton College Collections
Bowl 1960
Stoneware 20 x 36 cm
Ray Family Collection
Tall Standing Vessel 1960
Ceramic
75 x 35 x 12 cm
Ray Family Collection
Bottle 1960
Ceramic
Dimensions unknown
Gordon Baldwin Archive
Jar 1960
Earthenware
25 cm high
Gordon Baldwin Archive
Standing Form 1961
Earthenware 61 cm high
Green and Blue Bowl Early 1960s
Earthenware
38 x 33 x 7.5 cm
Alain Le Pichon Collection
Winged Figure 1964
Glazed ceramic
91.4 x 54 x 13 cm
Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery
Untitled 1961
Earthenware 110 cm high
Gordon Baldwin Archive
Warrior 1960
Earthenware 53 cm high
Seated King 1963
Aluminium alloy 38 cm high
Gordon Baldwin Archive
Vase
circa 1960-63
Earthenware
34 cm wide
Body Form and Totem
circa 1960
Earthenware
71 and 76 cm high
circa 1960
Earthenware
22 x 26 cm
Collection of Robin Nicholson
A Two-part Sculpture
circa 1960
Earthenware
23 x 28 x 25 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
circa 1964
Ceramic
63 x 53 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
circa 1960
Ceramic
91 x 35 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Two-part Sculpture
The Watcher
Torso
Sculpture 1963
Gordon Baldwin Archive
War Shape
Sculpted metal
Gordon Baldwin Archive
Figure 1963
Sculpted metal
Gordon Baldwin Archive
Vessel
Gordon Baldwin Archive
Small Winged Tower
Gordon Baldwin Archive
Vessel
Ceramic
Flying White
circa 1965
Painted wood construction
120 cm high
Gordon Baldwin Archive
Untitled circa 1960s
Earthenware
27.5 x 22.1 x 22.1 cm
Eton College Collections
Sculpture
Dimensions unknown
Gordon Baldwin Archive
The Ball 1965
Iroko wood
152.5 cm high
Gordon Baldwin Archive
Offering I 1965
Ceramic
76 cm high
Gordon Baldwin Archive
Sculptural Vessel Form circa late 1960s
Earthenware
27.3 x 19 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Planter 1965
Ceramic
183 cm high
Gordon Baldwin Archive
Torso pot
x 27 cm
and Albert Museum
Land Piece 1967
Earthenware
16.5 x 41 x 21 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
The Watcher 1962
Earthenware
84 x 30 x 26 cm
Lakeland Arts Collection
Seascape 1969
Earthenware
64.3 cm high
Victoria and Albert Museum
Angel 1968
Earthenware
30.5 x 47 x 13.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Reptilian Black 1969–70
Earthenware
33.5 x 48.8 cm
Victoria and Albert Museum
Slow Move 1966
Earthenware
69 x 33 x 27 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology
Gordon Baldwin, Potter and Poet by Anthony Gardner
Pottery and poetry, although each a near anagram of the other, have seldom gone together. None of the poetry that survives from Ancient Greece and Rome has been found on ceramics; Ancient Babylon does only slightly better, with some verse inscribed on clay tablets. Nor have English poets taken much inspiration from pottery –Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn being the great exception.
But for Gordon Baldwin, poetry is an inspiration which predates and informs his passion for ceramics. “Under the influence of Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire and others,” he wrote in an autobiographical note, “I went to London to become an artist.”1
He began writing poems himself as a schoolboy. “I was certainly not pottery-minded,” he says: “I was literaryminded. I happened to do French for A-level, and French A-level in those days was more to do with literature than with language.”2 Rimbaud and Baudelaire appealed to him partly because of their modernism and partly because of the Bohemian lifestyle pursued by “these wild and strange and rather frightening people.”3
Proust and André Gide were two other French writers who made a deep impression, and Baldwin overcame his dislike of travel enough to make a pilgrimage to places commemorated in Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Closer to home, he embraced the poetry of T. S. Eliot, R. S. Thomas and Gerard Manley Hopkins – the latter furnishing the idea of ‘inscape’ which became so vital to Baldwin’s work. By this Hopkins
meant the essence of a thing or object, whether a bluebell or a cloud or a stone: the inner characteristics that make it a unique part of creation, and which find expression in its outer form and the fulfilment of its purpose. Thus, in As kingfishers catch fire…, he wrote: “Each mortal thing does one thing … myself it speaks and spells, / Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.”
Also of great importance to Baldwin was Jean Arp, who – as both a poet and a sculptor – set a precious example of interdisciplinary excellence. Several of Baldwin’s sculptures are described as ‘poems’ for Arp, and a translation of one of Arp’s own poems was pinned to the wall of Baldwin’s studio at Eton:
He who tries to bring down a cloud by shooting at it with arrows will use his arrows in vain. Many sculptors resemble such strange hunters.
What one should do is this: one should charm the cloud by fiddling on a drum or drumming on a fiddle. Before long the cloud will descend, frolic on the ground and filled with self confidence turn into stone.
That’s how with a wave of his hand the sculptor creates his most beautiful sculpture.
Poems and poetic references are scattered through Baldwin’s sketchbooks. A fondness for very short lines and surreal images characterises much of his writing.
Describing the Welsh coast he finds:
A crinkly grey
Sea
Walking by its Edge
The wind is cold
Thoughts scatter
My head becomes
Thoughtless stone
A longer surreal poem gathers several important influences:
Who are they that approach wearing silk robes
Singing marching songs…
The acacia loosens its hair in the wind
And eases its limbs above the old brick walls.
Loose tiles rattle and fine grey dust
Settles on the floors of empty lofts
Yes Lorca girls tremble when they find
A lizard between their breasts.
It is the indefinable rhythm of small brass cymbals
And the foreign notes of silver trumpets
That split open my fragile head. I am invaded
By the darkness and the sound of a pear
Falling at midnight. A clock strikes
Darkness in the branches of trees
In the night-time of the garden
Of dark gong trembles to silence.
The imagery here is reminiscent both of the Surrealist masters – the pear recalling Magritte’s use of fruit, the clock Dalí’s fascination with time – and of T. S. Eliot, who similarly evokes a decaying building in Burnt Norton, imagining a wind strong enough “to break the loosened pane / And shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots.” Keatsian phrasing is also in evidence: “Who are they that approach wearing silk robes” echoing the rhetorical questions of Ode on a Grecian Urn:
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
Some of the poems describe human encounters: a child on a train has a gaze with the “Intensity of scarlet – too much to bear,” while an old woman obsessed with snakes “looks out from herself / without smiling.” There is also a fascination with human habitations:
With such energy
And will
They hacked at the Rock
Moved rubble
Made this track
Then hoisting up stones
As heavy as a man
Set them square
And aligned
With energy and
Determination
Move the rock and
Set it firm as lintel
To window and door…
But it is the natural world that dominates, often in the form of birds. A jackdaw takes flight “Marking the moment with a small blue echo / Fading into blackness;” a hawk swoops “talons out / To fetch up the life of the ground.” Landscapes, particularly cliffs and beaches, are another source of inspiration:
With a certain new
Stirring of my blood
I see the huge rocks
(sea worn)
Delicately at rest
They have a way
Of lying
To do with the
Energy of tide and wave
Delicately poised
As if the slightest breeze
Might move them
Which is strangely
At odds
With the weight I know
They have I think I detect
Somewhere in my chest
The history of their moving
I listen to the splash
Of breaking waves
And then to
The rumble and grind
Of boulder against boulder
In the deep water…
In a prose passage, Baldwin makes a direct connection between the work of the ceramicist and that of the poet:
I make vessels of clay like poets make poems of words.
I start with blurred images and engage with a mysterious alchemy. They grow of shimmers and whispers in the quiet studio amongst the darkness and the silences and spaces between the work already done…
To the idea of ‘inscape’ Gerard Manley Hopkins added that of ‘instress,’ meaning the spirit or energy which infuses all things and communicates their essence to the beholder. For Baldwin the creative process has a double aspect: the sculptures he creates allow him to express his inner self, but at the same time, in making them, he discovers the inscape of the clay he works with and helps communicate it to the world. In the same
way, his poetry is not only a revelation of his thoughts and feelings but a distillation to their very essence of the objects and creatures that inspire it. The passage continues:
… My mythic landscape or my inscape is given shape by my vessels.
The vessels gain significance from my inscape and give significance
A bird’s call will mark an internal landscape forever.
A remembered wind will shape a beach…
A piece works for me, as I say, when it crystallizes into significant yet unexplainable form
The vessels are resolved in the studio and in the mythic wilderness of my inner space as dark as the inside of a stone
The darkness inside a stone is inside of me. I have made vessels to light a dark place.4
Baldwin delights in the fact that T. S. Eliot – an especially strong influence on his poetry – found a similar correlation in Four Quartets, observing that words need a pattern to attain resolution “as a Chinese jar / Moves perpetually in its stillness.” He is fascinated by the construction of Eliot’s poems, particularly the element
of surprise, and one may detect a parallel here with the way Baldwin builds his sculptures.
Baldwin’s passion for words has not always endeared him to fellow ceramicists: he remembers being castigated by what he wryly calls ‘real potters’ for printing words on pieces such as his homages to Jean Arp. He has also been criticised for his use of increasingly poetic titles such as Vision from the Place of the Alchemist (one piece has actually had four titles: Blackscape, Stone Boat, Night Shape II and My Stone Boat Is an Ideas Carrier.) But, he says, “If you’re interested in words, titles are a natural [thing]. For me a title was not an explanation, but something that sat beside an object. It was certainly an indication of what I was doing, but it was something often in conflict.”5
When asked about the influence of Surrealism on his work, Baldwin said that it “seemed to open up a way of exploring the world.”6 Surrealism, of course, thrives on unexpected juxtapositions such as that of poetry and ceramics – and if one opens up a way of exploring the other, it behoves purists to complain.
1 ‘Looking back to the early 1950s,’ handwritten note in artist’s archive.
2 Conversation with Gordon Baldwin, 14 August 2024.
3 Ibid.
4 Notes in artist’s sketchbook 2000 – 2010.
5 Conversation with Gordon Baldwin, 14 August 2024.
6 Ibid.
A Tall Vessel Form
Ceramic, Drawings and Poetry
Baldwin’s work in the 1970s has two distinct phases: a first group of abstract forms with a black glossy glaze, followed by delicate bowls, plates and box forms in matt white. In the catalogue for his exhibition at the Oxford Gallery in 1975, John Houston writes “Gordon Baldwin’s work was black, now it is white.”
The early 70s are dominated by further articulations of the black abstract assemblages of the late 1960s. These geometric compositions hold more architectural associations than anything vessel oriented, some are entirely conceptual. Black Column with an Evening Shadow (1973) (page 50), for example, consists of layered upright planes, like corrugated metal, placed upon an unevenly layered base that surrounds the footprint and extends significantly to one side. The base, easily misunderstood as functional, is made with intention and spreads from the upright in an organic manner, like a puddle of oil. It is the title, not the form, however that describes the meaning. The shadow rendered solid, a consequence given form, the viewer is presented with cause and effect unified. The specification of an Evening Shadow in the title lends the sculpture an orientation in space, a sense of destined geography in relation to the outside world, aspects to be considered wherever and however it is displayed in the future, so that the shadow solid becomes the shadow real. In a sense, this is a live sculpture, to be fulfilled it must be moved to follow the path of the sun, a sundial in reverse. In doing so, Baldwin has made concrete the fleeting and ephemeral qualities of the shadow, that
which makes it shadow and not form, and so asks if the shadow can even exist without those qualities. Perhaps a surrealist precursor to similar questions Baldwin will later ask of his ceramic vessels.
Jim Robison quotes Baldwin as saying, ‘In the black objects […] he [Baldwin] was obsessed with his own internal space, subsequently as he became more interested in the space outside himself the white things became important.’ (Jim Robison, Modern Ceramic Sculpture: Gordon Baldwin, unpublished, date uknown). Much of the 1970s was dominated by white vessels with a matt white glaze, some on pedestals, some with flat lids, adorned with integral, not surface, geometric and gestural marks, cut outs and planes of colour that highlighted and projected beyond the boundaries of the vessels. This redefined the sense of interior and exterior, or form and surface as distinct. Whilst the dense black of Baldwin’s previous sculptures lent the works an impenetrability, here the white creates a blankness, an almost literal whitewashing in which surface is muted and bound with form. The white is a canvas upon which marks and words in colour are presented. A Small Monument to my Previous Work (1974) (page 63) demonstrates a definite intention in Baldwin to change the trajectory of his work: forms akin to his black assemblages are gathered upon a small rectangular pedestal but instead rendered in the new matt white.
From this aesthetic style develops Baldwin’s abstractions of the painting, taking the form of the bowl,
or dish, that became a recurring theme throughout his career. Broken Painting and Fragment of Painting in the Form of a Dish lay ground for Painting in the Form of a Bowl (all 1975) (page 74, 72 and 71). These works illustrate the importance of Baldwin’s mark making as more than merely decorative. The ceramic continuum has often treated surface decoration as something applied upon the clay surface, with that and form having little interaction. Often completed by different artists, at opposite ends of the creative process, the Studio Pottery movement towards modernism and postmodernism saw the practical processes unified: Lucie Rie famously only fired her pots once, form and decoration as one, and the Abstract Vessel movement saw artists thinking conceptually about the interaction and coalescence of decoration, surface and form. For Baldwin, his influences from the surrealist and abstract painting movement saw the treatment of the painted canvas as a single object rather than a painted surface on a canvas support. Embraced by Baldwin, his paintings in the form of various pots demonstrates a mutual importance and interaction of image and structure, uniting interior and exterior in a significant form.
In early 1980, Baldwin was included in the ‘CLAY SCULPTURE’ exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The catalogue quotes a letter from Tony Hepburn that describes how (then) recent clay sculpture developed directly out of making pots, citing the American ceramicists Peter Voulkos and John Mason, both of
whom began as vessel makers and moved towards more monumental sculpture whilst still working in clay. Baldwin himself is referenced, alongside Eduardo Paolozzi and Ruth Duckworth, as a catalyst for English sculptors working in clay. Contrary though to the above examples, the pot or vessel remained the core motivation and interrogation for Baldwin, even more so in later decades, his sculptural trajectory with clay being somewhat the opposite to that of Voulkos.
Despite much of Baldwin’s artistic works, and those works we most associate with the artist today, moving in an increasingly abstract and sculptural direction, he continued to create thrown works and functional pieces for what Baldwin called his Christmas Sale, to fund the family’s celebrations. Baldwin made use of the large kilns at Eton to fire bowls, plates and pots alongside the students works. Bob Catchpole, a colleague of Baldwin’s at Eton, recalls how people would line up outside the studio to get their hands on one of these pots. In an untitled and undated (although likely late 1970s due to the exhibitions listed and present tense reference to teaching at Camberwell) Baldwin is quoted: “When in great need of money, I make tableware and become very involved in it and enjoy the work to the exclusion of most other things.” Catchpole suggests this was because Baldwin didn’t have to think about process and ideas and as a proficient thrower he could focus on form after form.
Earthenware
48 cm high
Black Piece with Blue Stripe
Thrown Agateware Bowl on Tall Hollow Base
1972
Stoneware
24.2 x 17.9 cm
Shipley Art Gallery
Footed Bowl 1971
Earthenware
9.5 x 38.5 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
White Sea Object with Mirror Slit 1970
Stoneware
38 x 31 x 63 cm
Object from a Beachbox
Earthenware 18 x 24.5 cm
Early Sculptural Vessel
circa 1970
Earthenware
25 x 44 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Domed Form 1971
Stoneware
10.2 x 36.5 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Bowl
late 1970s
Ceramic 11 x 23.5 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Curved Wall Form
1971
Earthenware
22 x 49 x 15 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Black Rise Large Vessel 1971
Earthenware
40 x 36 x 22 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
1972
24.2 x 17.9 cm
Shipley Art Gallery
Maquette 1970s
Ceramic
30 x 28 cm
Sainsbury Centre
Two-Piece Sculptural Form circa 1970
Mixed media
18 x 19 x 16 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
circa 1971
Earthenware 47 cm wide
Crispin Kelly Collection
Untitled
Untitled
Stoneware
Wave Series Bowl 1970
Earthenware
16.8 x 26 x 23 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Rocking Form 1971
Stoneware
19.5 x 53.5 x 15.2 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Grey Bowl on Foot 1970
Stoneware
15.5 x 19.5 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
18.5
Bowl late 1970s
A Dark Brown Bowl on Coiled Stand
Stoneware
x 21.5 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Ceramic
20 x 20.5 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
A Porcelain Bowl with Lavender Interior
Porcelain
6 x 16 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
A Stoneware Bowl on Foot
mid-1970s
Stoneware 12 x 15.5 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Circular Piece with Wave
circa 1970
Earthenware 16 x 32 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
A Bowl on a Low Stand
mid-1970s
Stoneware 10 x 22 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Bird Bath
1970
Stoneware
123 x 72 x 48 cm
Peterborough Museum and Art
Gallery
A Stoneware Bowl on Drum Plinth
mid-1970s
Stoneware
18.5 x 20.5 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Rocking Piece
1971
Earthenware
49 x 50 x 14 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Black Dome Form 1970
Mixed media
38 x 45 x 61 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Winter Piece 1970
Earthenware
50 x 20 x 25 cm
Gordon Baldwin Archive
Trio 1970
Earthenware
27 x 42 x 33 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Untitled 1970
Earthenware
22 x 56 x 20.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Serpens 1970
Earthenware
61 x 48 x 14 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
To Do With Landscape circa 1970
Ceramic
76 cm high
Gordon Baldwin Archive
Black Column with an Evening Shadow 1973
Earthenware
40 x 52.7 x 37.8 cm
Middlesbrough Collection at MIMA, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art
Cup Form 1972
Earthenware 26 cm high
Crispin Kelly Collection
Earthenware
x 42 cm
Earthenware 7 x 35.5 cm
A Footed Pedestal 1972
Crispin Kelly Collection
A Pedestal Bowl 1972
Stoneware
x 10.2 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
A Pedestal Bowl 1973
Stoneware
x 37 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Untitled 1972
Crispin Kelly Collection
Plate circa 1972
Earthenware
5 x 36 cm
Collection of J S F Pode
Blackscape; Stone Boat; Night Shape II; My Stone Boat is an Idea Carrier
1972
Earthenware
16 x 50 x 40 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Nightscape I 1972
Earthenware
10.2 x 54 x 36.5 cm
Museum and Art Swindon
Maquette for a Bird Bath 1972
Stoneware
16 x 16 x 9.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust Bowl
April 1973
He wore the night like fur
He knew his dark tides (humped about his shoulders)
And the tides of two scarlet tulips
That obsessed him – they were always
Just the otherside of his eyelids
And in themselves made no signs
Or recognitions but were brilliantly
Scarlet
That man is asleep the child said
No not asleep – on that train journey
He had closed his shadow about him
Not asleep! When he opened his eyes
He looked into the unwavering gaze of a child
For a few moments. Such a gaze had the
Intensity of scarlet – too much to bear.
16th March 1977
A solitary horse eats
Its rectangular green world
On its back like a blanket
A rectangle of blue sky
With small white clouds
No questions are asked
A single red tulip flames
In a green garden
Is that somebody crying?
‘No’ she said. ‘I think it is unhappy Laughter’!
and Cover
Covered Pot early 1970s
Porcelain
6.3 x 12.5 x 11 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
1974
Porcelain
7 x 11 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Small Porcelain Cup on Tall Stand with Fins 1974
Porcelain
17.2 x 9.5 x 11.5 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Small Lidded
1974
Stoneware
6.3 x 8.8 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Teapot and Cover 1974
Earthenware
23 cm high
A Small Lidded Box with Flat Cover circa 1974
Stoneware
8 x 11.8 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
1974
Porcelain
8.1 x 9.95 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
A Small Lidded Round Box
Box
A Small Lidded Round Box
Agate Pedestal Bowl circa 1972
Stoneware
13.7 x 18.9 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
A Small Bowl with Broad Flat Rim 1973
Stoneware
4.5 x 10.4 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Small Cup on Base 1973
Porcelain
11 x 8 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Covered Pot 1974
Porcelain
5 x 8.7 x 7.7 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Ten Footed Bowls circa 1972
8 x 11 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Five Seconds in The Rain 1973-1974
21 x 34.5 x 34.5 cm
Earthenware
Crispin Kelly Collection
Stoneware
An Object in the Monumental Style About Landscape, Surrealist Sculpture
1972
Ceramic
82.5 cm high
Crispin Kelly Collection
April 7th 1977
IFor a moment a jackdaw sat on a scaffold pole
The spring sunlight shone on the brickwall
Mark the moment with a small gong
And stare at the white tip of the growing bud
Mark the moment in the eye of a bird
He stared at the birch twigs and fixed
Their shape with the claw of a bird
Marking the moment
The bird flew away leaving the
Shape of itself still
On the scaffold pole
Marking the moment with a small blue echo
Fading into blackness
II
Their lips move and there is the murmuring of breath
vibrating
What are these voices
In the uneasy winds in the dry grasses of high places
What are these voices saying
In the scrape of dry leaf on dry leaf
He feels the memory of grey waves
Breaking against cold rocks
They call up images with their murmuring
Slice the dark apple with sharp steel
Voices
Over high walls
Voices
The other side of dark windows shape their private ritual
Voices
Echo off cliffs where only a few flowers bloom in hesitant winds
The lobster crouches in its shell
And stares into its remote green mould
Who are they that approach wearing silk robes
Singing marching songs
And carrying dead birds as banners on their poles
They call up their gods and bite the sky with yellow teeth
They rattle their finger nails and march
Their paces with small brass cymbals
If you were close enough you would smell
Their goddess on their breath.
III
The acacia loosens its hair in the wind
And eases its limbs above the old brick walls.
Loose tiles rattle and fine grey dust
Settles on the floors of empty lofts
Yes Lorca girls tremble when they find
A lizard between their breasts.
IV
It is the indefinable rhythm of small brass cymbals
And the foreign notes of silver trumpets
That split open my fragile head. I am invaded
By the darkness and the sound of a pear
Falling at midnight. A clock strikes
Darkness in the branches of trees
In the night-time of the garden
Of dark gong trembles to silence.
A Small Lidded Round Box
Porcelain
6 x 12 x 13 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
April 21st 1977
He explained simply but with subtlety
Their
Silver cymbals
How the softness of the metal and the playing
Many tunes
Alters the shape of their sound
How silver changes when the flute is blown
The power of air – until sounds are
Seen
“in an empty sky”
Then he explained how to gather them
In that moment before wave break
And the absolute stillness of the
Centre of a leap
April 27th 1977
After the assurances in quiet rooms
With light slanting
The life of windows and
Materializations
A stream running over rock slabs
Swift and sounding
After the assurances in watery places
The lively green words
The liquid inscape
The adal reaches
Sky-scrape and reflections
Sea-scape and moon pull.
I tell you the lack of a mirror is dull
And without distant Horizons.
6th May 1977
It is the shadow of the sheep
The stun still low, early morning
That are significant for him. Why
The shadows on the shadows of
The grass blades that are significant
His shadow, calf long
The haw stoops, caught in his eye
Legs stretch down, talons out
To fetch up the life of the ground
About to drop. Leave go of the air.
Death, sustenance, energy.
12th May 1977
Rain. Clouds. Brilliant light
Between a baby crying,
At the station. A woman in the train
Inviting the cry of a rat.
The journey continues.
Flakes of ash or paper over
A block of flats, Plovers flight
Above a field
Butterflies above the sea
A large building full of clouds. Sepia
Skies.
Box with Upright Lid
Council
Fontana Box
Small Bowl on Half Cylinder Base
x 13.9 x 14.2 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Second Pink Poem Box
Ray Family Collection
Box with Cast Metal Lid
Stoneware, cast aluminium (lid)
Crafts Council
A Small Monument to My Previous Work
Stoneware
26.5 x 55 x 26 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
31st May 1977
Lustrous green of flies On dung
The close wrapped Warm sweet comfort Of the cowhouse.
That particular gleam Of crow wing against Light against hazy Bluish shadows of Wooded hillside the Sun above and behind.
August 1977
Though the bright Mackerel in Its dim Sea has no Such longing I long for The light For the morning Coming with Its bright Sun.
August 25th 1977
A helicopter
Flying
Across the sun
Only
Small white clouds
A very few spaced in the sky
The summer
Blue the sun’s
Burning
The blue hum
Of insects flying.
The roof joists crack in the heat
While an injured kitten sleeps in the sun
My face knows The sun’s
Heat and my hands
It’s burning. A butterfly
Rests on my knee
For a moment
The stone
Seat is silent and warms
Up slowly and remains
Silent
Two ladders with silver rungs rest Against a wall
A saffron to say
I cannot make
The addition
She Is travelling.
Lidded Box 1974
Earthenware
Dimensions unknown
Image courtesy of MAAK
Nightscape 1974
Earthenware
46 x 31 x 9 cm
Crafts Council
Larger Porcelain Bowl on Base about Painting and Sculpture 1974
Porcelain
19.8 x 19 cm
Victoria and Albert Museum
Box for Hans Arp 1974
Stoneware
29 x 25.5 x 9.1 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Apple with Disc 1974
Stoneware
3.5 x 16.4 x 12.8 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Come 1974
Stoneware
14 x 28 cm
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Sculptural Form 1974
Earthenware
4.8 x 26.7 x 19 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Bowl 1974
Porcelain
16.2 x 13 cm
National Museums Scotland
A Cup on Stand
circa 1974
Earthenware
26.7 x 17.7 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Small Bowl 1974
Porcelain
13 x 18 x 18 cm
Ray Family Collection
Untitled 1974
Earthenware
23.5 x 14.2 x 12 cm
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Lidded Box 1974
Earthenware
Dimensions unknown
Image courtesy of MAAK
Undated, but 1977
The indeterminate flight of flies
Their wings sound and the sound
Of surf on the beach
I clench
My teeth, my black bitterness
Within the rocks, within the head
Land, not the shadows but
The darkness under the surfaces of Things, the smallest pebble the ebb
And flow abrasion of entity against Entity
The indiscernible wearing away
A slow process, very low like
The erosion of any black bitterness
My anger’s nourishment, by butterfly wing
And grass blade, by shadow of gull
Gliding and air movement.
I’ve planted an iron stake in this Day
As dark as the shadow in the crack
Of the rock. The blue green
The wild flowers, the edge of things
Against the sky are anchored
To my dark stake. I hear Them shouting on the beach
And distant screams.
Its times like this when sacrifices Must be made of one friend.
30th October 1977
Where is the sound of the flute
Coming from
The slide of stacking notes
Intermittent piano notes
Jackdaw calls
Leaves fall
For it is the time of the year
Who plays the flute.
Under this grey sky.
Watching dying leaves
Move through a small window
I have no idea of the wind’s
Direction.
Pebbles brought from sea
Shores
To the middle of the town
Are splashed with rain
The ridge poles wait for joists
To be brought to them
The gentle craft of laying bricks.
A confident gesture
Under the grey sky
New wood against
The blue
Later.
There are no flags
On the new roof tree
But some sky caught
Between the new rafters
And some clouds
The sound of hammers
Striking bright nails
After the gentle
Laying of bricks
The jack daw calls.
at ‘The Place of Stones’
circa 1975
Found objects at Porth Neigwl
Dimensions unknown
Gordon Baldwin Archive
Construction
Painting in the Form of a Bowl
Earthenware 18 x 42 x 41 cm Ray Family Collection
x
x 25 cm
x
Lidded Bowl
Museum & Art Swindon
Mozart
Bowl with Disk Lid
Image courtesy of MAAK
Small Flat Dish
13 cm Ray Family Collection
Vessel 1975
Ceramic
24 cm high
Crispin Kelly Collection
Plate 1975
Ceramic
28 x 28 x 9 cm
Alain Le Pichon Collection
A Box for Jean Arp 1972
Stoneware
34 x 28 x 9 cm
Collection of Rob Kesseler and Agalis Manessi
Fragment of Painting in Form of a Dish 1975
Stoneware
35 x 48 cm
Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge
Box for Jean Arp 1975
Stoneware
32 x 23.5 x 7 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Events on a Ziggurat 1974
Earthenware
25 cm high
Bowl 1975
Ceramic
18 x 40 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Footed Bowl
Broken Painting
Earthenware
28.5 × 20.7 × 5.6 cm
(L)
(R) 31 × 26.5 × 6.5 cm
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
21 cm high Crafts Council
13th November 1977
He explained simply but with subtlety
About their silver cymbals. How
The softness of the metal
And the striking many times
Alters the shape of their sound. How
Silver changes when the flute is blown
Of sounds gathered
In that moment before wave break
He explained About the still point
Of sound. Through the windows
In his head he saw the space
Completely formed, left by a departing
Solitary bird. He explained How he looked for his eyes
In the morning darkness in the smallest
Seed.
But while he explained these things
He walked away down the corridors
Of the woman who picked no honeysuckle
And he gathered small bright flowers \ in the silent bell
Of her cathedrals.
He departed
Leaving behind the dark bird
Of his shadow eating bright red berries.
January 1978
Collect all the scraps
And paint them out in to
A form of obscurity
Dylan Thomas, 1946
“However taut, inevitably in order
A good poem may appear, it must Be so constructed that it is wide
Open, at any second, to receive the Accidental miracle which makes
A work of craftsmanship a Work of art”
Subject matter illustrated Manipulated towards ornament
Subject matter as basis or vehicle
For the real process
The observer involved – participator
The analysis of involvement if
The one actuating the process of Doing
Finding the way of setting up a Situation within which something May happen
The aesthetic pleasure in the way
Events fall into place of their Own necessity – their own nature
Free from all moral considerations
And free from any consideration of How this should be
A statement only useful in
As much as generates another Question/s – in both artist and Participator (viewer) Resolution of Problems without movement – useless
The archetypal form: the bowl etc
To have close experience
Of traditional qualities heard
About – the tension in curves, The sense of volume, balance
Swelling and diminishing, harmony
Etc – the fulfilment of rim and
Neck, harmony of ornament, and then look for a new Organization. To look for
The difference between a product
And an event or series of events
1st August 1978 (Rhiw, Wales)
I thought if I move
One stone on this Beach I alter the Universe. Having thought It – I moved nothing
But myself. The act Was continuous and Is continuous.
Bowl on Pedestal circa 1970s
Ceramic
23 x 15 cm
Collection of J S F Pode
Bowl on Pedestal
circa 1970s
Ceramic
25 x 22 cm
Collection of J S F Pode
Bowl Form
1975
Ceramic
14.5 cm diameter
Crispin Kelly Collection
Large Footed Bowl
circa 1975
Earthenware
16 x 38 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Lidded Pot
circa 1975
Earthenware
5.5 x 11.2 cm
Charger with Pink and Green
Linear Decoration
1975
Ceramic
9.5 x 37 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Bowl
circa 1970s
Ceramic
43 cm diameter
Collection of J S F Pode
Bowl on Pedestal
circa 1970s
Ceramic
22 x 18 cm
Collection of J S F Pode
Sculptural Vessel from the ‘Drefach’ Series 1976
Earthenware
32.3 x 51.5 x 10.5 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Bowl 1976
Earthenware
8 x 45 cm
Collection of J S F Pode
Bowl with Apples mid-1970s
Ceramic
23.5 cm diameter
Crispin Kelly Collection
Sculptural Form from the ‘Drefach’ Series circa 1976
Earthenware
24.5 x 33 x 29 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
A Sculptural Vessel 1976
Earthenware
26 x 23.5 x 9.5 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
A Sculptural Vessel 1976
Earthenware
26 x 26 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Vessel for Max Ernst 1975
Earthenware 39 cm high
Vertical Slab-Built Form 1976
Stoneware
35.1 x 41.9 x 8 cm
Shipley Art Gallery
Free-Form Dish 1976
Stoneware 11 x 50 cm
Shipley Art Gallery
Image in the Form of an Upright Irregular Surface with Notches 1976
Earthenware
22.1 x 25.9 cm
Keramiekmuseum Princessehof
Sculptural Vessel 1976
Earthenware
26 x 26 x 6 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Bowl 1976
Earthenware
38.5 x 33 cm
Alain Le Pichon Collection
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Sculptural Vessel
Earthenware
34.4 x 44.4 x 10 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
10th August 1978
It is
Good
That the sun has brought out
Her breasts
And that I can
Use them to destroy
The immaculate
Snows of nuns
It is good
That little shreds of
Many a And evaporate
Between shreds of my flesh
Popping seaweed
The happy knife cuts
It is
Good
That the sea is so blue.
When an owl
Shrieks in the wood
It is good
That the sun has brought out
Her breasts this afternoon
To greet the transparent moon.
When the hands are Clapped a sound is produced
Listen to the sound of one Hand. If you have heard
The sounds of one hand
You can also make me
Hear it
29th October 1978
Dead sycamore leaves
Lie with Sunday bells
The whine
Of starlings Childhood
Winters the grey air
The grey light the grey
Smell of gardens falling
Without shadows
The hidden starlings
Whine
People have lost
Their voices.
Piles of fruit
Rotting
He blossoms into
A great grey fungus
Greyness and connections
That he could not
Describe the geometry
The lines of the grey connecting
The stone the inert
Grass
The decaying
Pear
The apples
The damson leaf
Losing identity
The mathematics of stillness
The sound of the leaf
Lying
Desperating the shape
Of a leaf decaying
Desperation in a bowl
Of walnuts.
Bowl on Stand
Porcelain
12.2 x 10 x 11 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Small Vessel from a Surrealist Period
1976
Porcelain
9.5 x 11 x 9 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
A Bowl on a Low Stand
circa 1976
Stoneware 15 x 17 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
A Bowl on Pedestal
1976
Stoneware
20.5 x 17 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
A Stoneware Bowl on Cylindrical Pedestal
1976
Stoneware
22.7 x 15.5 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Small Cup on Stand with Two Fins
1976
Porcelain
9.4 x 9.2 x 11 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
A Bowl on a Tall Stand
1976
Stoneware
23.5 x 14.5 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Monday 3rd July 1979
Whale hump
Head land.
Uncontrollable still
Black cattle on the Green Square field.
Gull shadow.
Swell space
Used for a leaf spread
Of rotting seaweed.
Tuesday 31st July 1979
Sun light
Sea hiss
Cloud drift
Blue and Sparkle
Wind hiss
(in the grasses)
Smell of earth heating
Tense thin (too thin)
Arch of gull wing
Head land
Backing
Rocks against hill
Blue edge
Clothes drying
Magenta
Turquoise
White
Dark blue
Maroon
Vermillion check.
Cloud drifting and
Dispersion
Wave drift, slowly
To white edge
And the tall grasses
Bend in front of the
Horizon.
47 x 23 x 12 cm
Vessel from the Seferis Series 1977
Earthenware
Corvi-Mora, London
Painting in the Form of a Dish 1976
Earthenware
10 x 43.5 x 36 cm
York Museums Trust
Lidded Vessel for Jean Arp 1976
Stoneware
16.5 x 22 x 17 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Fragments of Painting in the Form of a Dish 1976
Stoneware
9.7 x 46.5 cm
Victoria and Albert Museum
Arch Series I 1976
Earthenware
36 x 37 x 30 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Image Consisting of Two Upright Surfaces with Relief Decoration
25.7 x 26 x 8.5 cm Keramiekmuseum Princessehof
Slabbed Composition with Painting 1976
Stoneware
14 x 41 x 40.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
A Bowl on Stand 1977
Earthenware
26.5 x 17.6 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Footed Bowl circa 1970s
Earthenware
7 x 39.2 x 35.6 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
A Small Lidded Round Box
1977
Earthenware
12.5 x 27.5 x 30.5 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Painting in the Form of a Bowl 1977
Stoneware 20 x 43.4 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Footed Bowl circa 1970s
Earthenware
8 x 36 x 30.5 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Bowl
1977
Earthenware 11 x 22 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Small Vessel from a Surrealist Period
1977
Porcelain
12.5 x 8.5 x 7.2 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Small Vessel from a Surrealist Period
1977
Porcelain
10.5 x 10.5 x 6.7 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
x 30 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Wednesday 1st August 1979
It is the tense
Aerofoil of the gulls
Wing
The slim curve
Of the air pressure
Tight bow string
Curve our wind.
The hare bells
Quink blue
Foot fall
Drum beat
On the hollow hill
Standing above the Great black backed
Gulls glide of cliff
Above the tan brown
Hover the kestrel
Four miles walking
On cliff back to Ysgo.
Gorse and bracken
The vegetable cooking
Smell of bracken
And harebells close
To the ground
And the wind, cool
About wrist and throat and Inside the shirt
To where the white Waves came
To the shore
By the huge Black boulders.
The gentle man
Gentle with age
Looked over the bay
From his house
On the hill, he Shuffles to view
The view and his Slow shuffling
Dying
He brings the bay
Curve
Close to his grey
Suit and in a certain Opacity of his eyes.
He fingers his days
While the waves
Break far away.
Thursday 2nd August 1979
Wash the night
Off the face
With a handful of sea
Piss a yellow sparkling
Arc
In the sun
The sea wears
Blue satin
On its buttocks
And thighs
The heron has fed
Grabs at air hands in
Neck and legs
And is away over
The peninsula
The waves
Swallow my ankles
Cool mouths and lips
The acacia has wild
Hair.
With a certain new
Stirring of my blood
I see the huge rocks
(sea worn)
Delicately at rest
They have a way
Of lying
To do with the
Energy of tide and wave
Delicately poised
As if the slightest breeze
Might move them
Which is strangely
At odds
With the weight I know
They have
I think I detect
Somewhere in my chest
The history of their moving
I listen to the splash
Of breaking waves
And then to the to
The rumble and grind
Of boulder against boulder
In the deep water
A piece of polythene
Crinkles behind my
Right shoulder
The grind, lift, roll, surface
To surface, knock and bruise
Hard curve against
Hard curve.
Bowl 1977
Earthenware
20 x 39.3 x 39.3 cm
Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State
Painting in the Form of a Bowl 1977
Earthenware
20 x 43.4 x 43.4 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Arch Series Number 5
1977
Earthenware
20.5 cm high
Crispin Kelly Collection
Sculptural Vessel 1977
Earthenware 26 x 26 x 8 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Bowl 1977
Earthenware
11.5 x 33 x 28 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Bowl circa 1977
Earthenware 11 x 28.8 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Pedestal
Pedestal
Friday 3rd August 1979
She was old
With a parchment face
Wind and sun
Looking after her sheep
By the sea
She looks out from herself
Without smiling
Have you seen any snakes
No
I carry a stick
I will kill them every one
A little girl plays
Her violin
With still and awkward bow
In a field by the sea
With sheep grazing
The vicar said
He saw many snakes
She with the parchment
Face
Wants to kill them
Vipers she calls them
Waves her stick
The awkward bow
Scrapes the strings
They wander on the Beach
What are they looking for
What are they thinking about
Are they looking for
Themselves
I wander on the beach
Am I looking for me
My head is too full
Of rock and water to think
Lichen orange
Lichen yellow
Lichen grey
Lichen black
The rock as big as a house
Black cracks
And fissures
Black cross
Bramble life
Harebell life
Gorse life
Grass life
Reed life
Bracken life
Lichen life
I heard a kestrel call
For the first time
Saturday 4th August 1979
Da de daa dee ya
Da de daa da de ya
See a cat
De da de de daa ya
Climbing the mountain road
Wild flowers and song phrase
Up up the dry mountain Road
Sweet smells of Cow dung
With the help of children I drew a line of pebbles
As big as a man’s hand Down the beach
As straight as possible Into the sea
Dylan
The straight line of pebbles
Covers the naked in the waves
And the small waves came
Came with the incoming Tide
With their cool lips
Lisping and nibbling at Sand
And line I could not have been
A friend of yours Dylan
But I know your words On this place
Bowl-Shaped Object
1978
Ceramic
14.4 x 33.5 cm
Keramiekmuseum Princessehof
Pedestal Vase
1978
Earthenware
23.5 x 17.5 x 16 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Fragment of a Painting in the Form of a Dish
1978
Earthenware
11.5 x 49.8 x 46 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
A Conical Vessel with Fin 1978
Ceramic
28.5 cm high
Crispin Kelly Collection
Form of a Painting
1978
Earthenware
10 x 50 x 32.5 cm
Erskine, Hall and Coe
Bowl late 1970s
9 x 23.5 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Ceramic
Sunday 5th August 1979
With such energy And will
They hacked at the Rock
Moved rubble
Made this track
Then hoisting up stones
As heavy as a man
Set them square
And aligned
With energy and
Determination
Move the rock and Set it firm as lintel
To window and door
Took saw and adze
To trunk and branch
And set joists and purlins
And ridge
With such totemic
Will
These just above the beach
They made house and
Home
And took bright
Mackerel from the sea
Until the long waves
Reached in And sent them back
Up their track
Leaving the huge stones
Set in wall and Chimney
The kestrel fixed upon its Eye
Upon a point in space
Body tail and wing
Adjusted to the wind
Eye steady on a point (a pivot)
Above the rocky beach
Rocks –
Upward rub of wave
And shingle
To convex wave curve
Above curve
Smooth
History of wave and first
Rock shape
And grind of shingle
The kestrel tethered at Another point
Rock steady about its eye
And ring the bell at Ysgo
Bowl
1979-86
Earthenware
23 x 42 cm
Sainsbury Centre
Bowl 1979-86
Earthenware
18 x 32.5 cm
Sainsbury Centre
Bowl 1979-86
Earthenware
15.5 x 23.5 cm
Sainsbury Centre
Large Bowl
1978-1988
Earthenware
38 x 46.3 x 42.5 cm
Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology
Abstract Ceramic 1979
Stoneware
33 x 33 x 8 cm
Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge
Bowl 1979-86
Earthenware
23.5 x 33.5 cm
Sainsbury Centre
Monday 6th August 1979
Green grey sea
Breaks white at boulders
Wet air
To wash away night
From eyes
Seal snout in the
Heave of waves
And churn of water
To take air
A bright green
Sycamore leaf
On the grey rocks
Rain wet
I stand still and
Watch with our eyes.
Tuesday 7th August 1979
She
A young girl
Broke a stem
Of rock samphire “smell it”
The finely blended herb
And lemony smell of the Sauce
For your fish
Taken quietly
With a bright fork
The mountain sheltered
Us from the wind
But not the rain
And the beach
Was kitchen to the smell
Of that broken stem.
Cup on Stand
28.4 x 14.5 x 15.5 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Developed Bowl on a Base
1979
Earthenware
41 x 28.5 x 25 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Reach for the Eye I 1979-1980
Earthenware
77 x 63 x 30 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
A Bowl on Stand
1978
Porcelain
23.5 x 16.5 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
1979
Earthenware
29.5 x 29 x 18 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Expanded Bottle
1979
Earthenware
75 x 41 x 35 cm
1979
Earthenware
29.5 x 29 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Pedestal Bowl
Pedestal Bowl
Wednesday 8th August 1979
Ysgo
Havenan
Shivev
Bownnog
An early stroking
Sea
Grey blue silk
Sea
Shine of early sun
The bright salmon
Leaps six
Feet in the air
The sea slow
Rhythm
Strokes my ear
My mind
What a skin
The sea has
My hands know it
Without touching
How long did it take
To build the walls
Of the cottage
Set the sea rocks
Course upon course
Select with skill
And without rush
Break to measure
Split and flake
To wedge tight
Call of curlew
And cockcrow
How long to heave and Hoist
The boulders from the beach
To shape walls and
Hearth
Nothing remains the Same
Little shifts and Movements
Deep in the water
The boulders move
Rock and Rub.
Dry croak of raven
Rocks
In the high place
Where men and women
With little comfort
And uncaring of wet and Dirt
Dug hand deep into Bowels
Burrowed in the guts
Of the mountains
For metal and slate.
Tatlin Tower
28 x 9 x 15.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Thursday 9th August 1979
The wind
The wind woods sea
Grey and green
And I am yellow Harlequin
To his sea
By the cottage
Without a roof
By windy seas
Edge
Wind strokes gleaming Hill fur
I wait for the Zebra.
Friday 10th August 1979
My god she’s singing Apples
Imagine a beach of Apples
She’s lying down giving Birth to plums
Imagine a beach of plums
And a gentle sea Lapping
He’s begun to sing a little
As he watches
He drops the reptile egg
He’s carrying
He walks down the steep Stoney track
Longing to join in
But he will remain
An observer
And tomorrow
Vessel from the Enigma Series 1986
Earthenware
65 x 60 x 25 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Ceramic and Drawings
Throughout the 1980s Baldwin’s work came to be more clearly developed in series. Ideas developing from one piece to another, showing distinct evolution of ideas, both conceptual and physical. Baldwin achieved two significant solo exhibitions in this decade, the latter of which, ‘Mysterious Volumes’ in 1989 at Boijmansvan Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, highlighted this tendency to work in series. The catalogue describes: “Like white clouds drifting across the sky Gordon Baldwin’s volumes follow each other, the formations linking in a steady rhythm, resembling each other, yet not one the same as the previous or the next. Chains of inventions become series of objects, the images overlapping one another or distancing themselves, seemingly disappearing from sight only to reappear here and there at a later time.” The exhibition only displayed works made since 1980 and Baldwin recalls his fondness for the exhibition’s design, showcasing ten different recurring themes in his recent work, as described in the catalogue: inscapes, jug-forms, funnel shapes on feet, winged vessels, vessel shapes on feet, bowls and bowl-forms, monads, bottle shapes, flag and axe forms, and sculptural objects.
One such series, exhibited in Rotterdam and also a major feature of Baldwin’s other solo exhibition of the decade: ‘Gordon Baldwin: A Retrospective View’ (1983) at the Cleveland County Museum (which toured to various venues in the UK), was the bottle, or developed bottle shape. Where Baldwin has previously (and
continually) been preoccupied by the space within a vessel, or a form, or a person, Baldwin’s treatment of the bottle extends beyond the physical confines of the material object to assess and interrogate its interactions and influences in the space beyond it. Often, a central form, a devolved conical shape appears representative of the physical bottle, beyond it extends straw-thin spouts, flat geometric planes and corrugated fins, decorated with sweeping marks and energetic splashes of glaze.
Baldwin’s bottles relate directly to Umberto Boccioni’s Development of a Bottle in Space (1913) – a sculpture that deconstructs and manifests the three-dimensional space around an object. The bottle form is opened and broken into winding sections that invoke a rotary momentum. Boccioni’s intentions are well described in his Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture published in 1912 and seeks to “proclaim the complete abolition of the finished line and the closed statue. Let us open up the figure like a window and enclose within it the environment in which it lives. Let us proclaim that the environment must form part of the plastic block as a special world regulated by its own laws.” Unlike Boccioni’s bottle though, which reveals the hollow interior as part of the environmental space it exists within, Baldwin’s bottles remain closed, the delineation of interior and exterior space is maintained. The elongated and stick-thin spouts are a barrier to the interior rather than a channel in or out. The fins act
upon the bottle form almost as a challenge to anyone trying to handle the object. Where Boccioni, and Futurism more generally, comments upon the glory of technological development, the speed and mechanism of mass production, Baldwin’s developed bottles may comment instead on the interaction with the hand, and the development of the form beyond usefulness into the space it occupies. Whilst Boccioni’s sculptures invoke dynamism and momentum, inferring the journey of the bottle through its mechanised production, Baldwin’s bottles maintain a static stability, planted firmly on the surface, seemingly interested more in the physicality of the object in space rather than movement through it.
This sense of planted-ness relates also to many of Baldwin’s plinthed bowls in this decade. Developed from a number of works in the 1970s entitled Bowl on a Base or Bowl on a Pedestal (page 106-107), in which small simple bowl forms are elevated on a subtle square or rectangular base to highlight the object-ness of the bowl and divorce it from direct connection from the surface, therefore negating any perception of its utilitarian potential. Into the 1980s, Baldwin’s bases and pedestals are themselves developed, becoming not just mere additions to the bowl or sculpture atop but part of the sculpture whole, occasionally larger even than the object it elevates. This action goes further than to highlight any object-ness but instead makes a performance of the display as a whole, drawing the viewers’ attention to the presentation of the object. Similarly, Baldwin’s Shelving
series (page 118 and 122) feature small pots or forms on a painted canvas shelf, but the wall-mounted shelf is not just a display mechanism, it is part of the artwork. Instead of a functional negation however, these works talk to a decorative narrative of ceramic, the ornamental placing of works for aesthetic appreciation. The work as a whole though speaks to the domain of painting, placed upon the wall in the space of the canvas.
The term inscape frequently appears in Baldwin’s titles from the 1980s onwards, derived from Gerard Manley Hopkins concepts of individuality and uniqueness, alongside instress. The inscape is a being or object’s “distinctive design that constitutes [its] individual identity” and one recognises another’s inscape in the act of instress (Stephen Greenblatt, “Gerard Manley Hopkins” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 2006). This interaction exerts a sort of divine exchange between beings, forms or objects. Baldwin’s use of the term suggests something geographic, perhaps in its closeness to landscape but also in his description of ‘Vessel[s] from an inscape’. However, it is more likely that these vessels are a manifestation of Baldwin’s own inscape, a sense that the inscape is an expression of an inner core of individuality and of an unseeable interiority. As the kingfisher in Manley Hopkins’s poem goes about his uniquely kingfisher-y ways, Baldwin manifests the unknowable interior via the impenetrable vessel. The forms are often bulbous and rounded, organically asymmetric so the interior volume is unclear from the
exterior form. Small openings pierce the surface and black glazed mouths give way to dark interiors painted with black slip, the core barely glimpsed but certainly there. In such a way, the time-long metaphor the vessel holds for the body becomes increasingly symbolic in Baldwin’s hands. The vessel or body is a container for the unknowable essence of our individual self.
Baldwin’s Axe Vessel (1986) (page 140), now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, was included in the first iteration of Oliver Beer’s Vessel Orchestra (2019), a sound-based installation of thirty-two sculptures, utilitarian vessels, and decorative objects selected for their natural pitches to form an instrument. The inclusion of Baldwin’s sculptural work in an experimental music piece appealed to the artist’s own interest in contemporary alternative music and improvisational composing, having commissioned a number of music pieces himself by Huw Watkins and Philip Cashian.
Painting in the Form of a Bowl
1980
Earthenware
17 x 49 x 40 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Extended dish: Seferis Series No. 1
1980
Earthenware
35.9 x 40.7 cm
Victoria and Albert Museum
Developed Bowl
1980
Earthenware
43 x 38 x 22 cm
Crafts Council
Bowl Form
1980
Earthenware
15 x 42.1 cm
Usher Gallery, Lincoln
Shell Sculpture
1980
Earthenware
36.2 cm high
Landesmuseum Württemberg
Bowl from the Seferis Series 1980
Earthenware
37 x 37 x 39 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Developed Bottle 1980
Earthenware
34.5 x 28.5 x 10 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Developed Bowl on Base 1980
Earthenware
62 x 26 x 20 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Developed Bottle with Flange 1980
Earthenware
32 x 34 x 25.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Shelving Series 1980
Canvas, wood, earthenware
106 x 79 x 15.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Reach for the Eye 1980
Earthenware
80 x 60 x 37 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Shelving Series IV 1980
Canvas, wood, earthenware
78 x 61 x 31 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
The Cock 1980
Earthenware
77 x 27 x 17.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Bowl from the Seferis Series 1980
Earthenware
35 x 45 x 42 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Untitled circa 1980s
Earthenware
60 x 26.5 x 12.5 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Bowl from the Seferis Series
Bowl Form 1980
Earthenware
17.4 x 32.7 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Developed Bowl on Base 1980
Earthenware
54.5 cm high
Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt
Developed Bottle circa 1980
Earthenware
36.5 cm high
Crispin Kelly Collection
Drawing in August 1981
Canvas, wood, earthenware
87 x 61 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Extended Bowl 1980
Earthenware
31.3 x 29 cm
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery
Extended Bowl 1980
Earthenware
37.4 x 30.5 cm
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery
Dish 1981
Earthenware
50 x 41 cm
Crafts Council
Painting in the Form of a Bowl, January 1982 1981
Earthenware
15.2 x 41.5 cm
Usher Gallery, Lincoln
Reach for the Eye I circa 1980
Earthenware
70 x 65 cm
Sainsbury Centre
Improvisation on a Dish 1981
Earthenware
51 x 45 x 43 cm
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Developed Bottle 1981
Earthenware
37.7 x 28.5 x 9.8 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Shelving 6
Mixed media
88 x 86.5 x 12 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Gordon Baldwin
Blue Vessel circa 1980s
Earthenware
30 x 30 cm
Wakefield Council
Permanent Art Collection
(The Hepworth Wakefield)
Windswept Bottle 1981
Earthenware
61.5 x 52 x 12 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Developed Bottle with Buttress 1981
Earthenware
72 x 58 x 14 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Painting in the Form of a Bowl 1981
Earthenware
15.5 x 45 x 41 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Extended Bowl in the Form of a Painting 1981
Earthenware
14 x 60 x 37 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Developed Bottle 1981
Earthenware
63 x 76 x 15 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Developed Bottle 1981
Earthenware
52 x 69 x 10 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Round Vessel on a Base
Earthenware
37 x 33 x 25 cm
Tall composite totem vessel
Earthenware
68 cm high
Developed Bottle 1982
Earthenware
35 cm high
Painting in the from of a Bowl
Earthenware 43 cm wide Bowl
Earthenware 69 cm wide
Vessel with spout and flag
Earthenware
52 x 66 x 16 cm
Painting in the Form of a Bowl
undated, accessioned 1982
Earthenware
14 x 37.5 x 36 cm
Glasgow Life Museums
Grey Painting in the Form of a Bowl 1981
Earthenware
20.1 x 50.0 x 42.4 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Developed Bottle on Base 1982
Charcoal on paper
84 x 59.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Drawing in August 1981
Mixed media on paper
87 x 61 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Developed Bottle: Rectangle on Bottle 1981
Earthenware
71 x 14.5 x 58.5 cm
Middlesbrough Collection at MIMA, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art
Winged Form 1983
Earthenware
27.9 x 45.1 x 39.4 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Avis
Earthenware 41 x 28 x 20 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
45.5 x 44 x 6.2 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Vessel from Landscape Series 1983
Earthenware
41.3 x 32.6 x 31.5 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Wedge Work 1983
Earthenware 31 x 31 x 24 cm Collection of Brian Harding
Round Vessel on a Base 1983
Earthenware
43 x 46 x 31.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Covered Bowl in the Form of a Painting 1983
Earthenware 11 x 48 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Large Rectangular Shallow Platter 1983
Stoneware 10 x 43 x 60 cm
Shipley Art Gallery
An Irregular Form 1983
Earthenware
9 x 21.2 x 28 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Head Form 1984
Earthenware
26.7 x 51.8 x 27.9 cm
Flagged Vessel (front) 1985
Earthenware
48.5 x 31.6 x 15.3 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Flagged Vessel (back) 1985
Earthenware
48.5 x 31.6 x 15.3 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Perched Vessel 1985
Earthenware
61.5 x 22.5 x 16.3 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Winged Vessel 1984
Earthenware
59 x 44.2 x 27.3 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Pot circa mid-1980s
Earthenware
24 x 33 cm
Gallery Oldham
White Winged Vessel
30.5 cm high
Painting in the Form of a Bowl 1984
Earthenware
18 x 30.8 cm
Crafts Council
Stacked Vessel 1984
Earthenware
106 x 35 x 25.5 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Bowl 1984
Earthenware
17.5 x 32 cm
Sainsbury Centre
Bowl on a Base 1984
Earthenware
25 x 42 x 30 cm
Private Collection
Painting in the Form of a Bowl 1985
Earthenware
38 x 46 x 41 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Tall Stacked Vessel 1984
Earthenware
67 x 27 x 18 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Developed Bottle 1984
Earthenware
75.5 x 39 x 16.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Avis II 1984
Earthenware
58.8 x 53.8 cm
Victoria and Albert Museum
Vessel in the Form of a Voice 1984
Earthenware
42.5 x 48 x 32.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Painting in the Form of a Bowl 1984
Earthenware
20 x 31 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Round Vessel on Base circa 1984
Earthenware
38 x 33 x 34.3 cm
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Picasso Variation Blue II
1984
Porcelain and earthenware
27 x 26 x 20.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Vessel from the Enigma Series
Earthenware
Bowl
Earthenware 32.1 x 38.1 cm
Developed Bottle
Standing form
Earthenware 70.5 cm
Two “Perched” vessels
Earthenware
cm high
Dyad V
Earthenware
cm
Round Vessel on a Base
40 x 47.5 x 33 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Large Bowl 1985
Earthenware
23.4 x 41.5 cm
Collection of Brian Harding
Monumental Form on Pedestal Foot
circa 1984
Earthenware
103.2 cm high
Erskine, Hall & Coe
Tall Standing Form 1985
Earthenware
108 x 49 x 16 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Developed Sculptural Form 1984
Earthenware
54 x 36 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Large Found Form with Plinth 1984
Earthenware
43.9 x 46.2 cm
Middlesbrough Collection at MIMA, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art
Also like a Bird 1985
Earthenware
16 x 49 x 52.5 cm
Glasgow Life Museums
Tall Vessel 1985
Earthenware
95 cm high
Collection of Brian Harding
Also a Bird 1985
Earthenware
20.5 x 46 x 44 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Large Bowl Form 1985
Earthenware
37.4 x 46 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Black Bowl 1985
Earthenware
31 x 34 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Axe Vessel 1985
Earthenware
54 x 45 x 13 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
1985
Earthenware
126 x 40 x 25 cm
Collection of Brian Harding
Argos
Tall Standing Form
100 x 40 x 19 cm
Earthenware
Corvi-Mora, London
Sculpture
1986
Earthenware
99 cm high
Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum
Bowl
1986
Earthenware
20.5 x 31.5 cm
Sainsbury Centre
Sculpture
1986
Earthenware
29 x 43 cm
National Museums Scotland
Painting in the Form of a Bowl
1986
Earthenware
22.5 x 32 x 32 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Black Stoneware Bowl with White and Brown Details
1986
Earthenware
25.5 x 34 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Striped Mountain
1986
Earthenware
48.5 x 47.5 x 20 cm
Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Dyad V
1986
Earthenware
32.5 x 35 x 29 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Globular Form with Fin
1986
Earthenware
16 x 30 x 20.5 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Vessel Form
1986
Earthenware
44 cm high
Image courtesy of MAAK
Dyad II
1986
Earthenware
51 x 39.5 x 21 cm
Shipley Art Gallery
Stacked Vessel
1986
Earthenware
72.5 x 43 x 21 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Vessel from the Enigma Series
1986
Earthenware
41 x 56 x 17 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Enigma 1986
Earthenware
37.6 x 37.5 x 13 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Standing Form 1986
Earthenware
73.9 x 40 x 15 cm Image courtesy of MAAK
Bowl 1987
Stoneware
10 x 48 cm
Sainsbury Centre
Dish 1987
Stoneware 10 x 48 cm
Eton College Collections
Flat Vessel 1986
Ceramic
62 x 47 x 16 cm
Landesmuseum Württemberg
Tall Standing Form 1986
Stoneware
48.8 x 45 x 26.5 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Anthropomorphic Vessel II
1986
Earthenware
72 x 54 x 25 cm
Museum Boijmans
Van Beuningen
Leaning Vessel Form
1987
Earthenware
51 x 27 x 19.5 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Eighteen x Eighteen X 1987-1988
Earthenware
42 x 41 x 10.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Grey Painting in the Form of a Bowl
1987
Earthenware
17 x 42 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Monad
1987
Earthenware
67 x 22.5 x 15 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Monad 1987
Earthenware
65 x 33 x 21.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Monad 1987
Earthenware
64 x 28 x 25 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Vessel from the Genesis Series
1987
Earthenware
57 x 30 x 30 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Large Flattened Vessel
1987
Earthenware
43.8 cm high
Collection of Brian Harding
Globular Vessel Form
1987
Earthenware
23 x 24 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Large Sculptural Leaning Form
1987
Earthenware
63.5 cm high
Collection of Brian Harding
Monad
1987
Earthenware
74.5 x 22 x 16 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Vessel 1987
Earthenware
32.3 x 30.1 cm
The Mint Museum
Monad with Square
1987
Earthenware
72 cm high
Perched U-Shaped Vessel
1986
Earthenware
55 x 72 cm
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Monad
1987
Earthenware
66.1 x 26.4 x 24.9 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Two Developed Bottles
1987
Earthenware
43.5 x 26.2 x13.5 cm each
Image courtesy of MAAK
Painting in the Form of a Bowl
1988
Earthenware
15 x 37 cm
Sainsbury Centre
Large Round Vessel from an Inscape 1988–89
Earthenware
58.4 x 48.4 cm
Victoria and Albert Museum
Long Spout
1988
Earthenware
78 x 38 x 13 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
1988
24.5 x 30.5 cm
Keramiekmuseum Princessehof
White Bowl
Ceramic
Spouted Vessel 1988
Earthenware
68.5 x 34.8 x 13 cm
Museum Boijmans
Van Beuningen
Large Round Vessel From an Inscape
1988
Earthenware
39.5 x 46.8 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Painting in the Form of a Bowl
1988
Earthenware
28.3 x 42 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Painting in the Form of a Bowl
1988
Earthenware
16 x 38 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Painting in the Form of a Bowl
1988
Earthenware
20.5 x 41.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Large Open Bowl
1987
Earthenware
10 x 47.6 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
A Pair of Monads
1988-9
Earthenware
72.5 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Painting in the Form of a Bowl
1989
Earthenware
40 cm high
Longspout
1988
Earthenware
75.2 x 40.1 x 11.4 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Vessel from the Belvedere Series 1988
Earthenware
72 x 35 x 15 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Vessel from an Inscape
1988
Earthenware
31.3 x 25.7 x 20.4 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Vessel from the Belvedere Series
1988
Earthenware
76 x 37 x 13 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Monad
1988
Earthenware
72.5 x 28 x 16 cm
Collection of Brian Harding
Dark Vessel from an Inscape 1988
Earthenware
34 x 28 x 25 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Long Spout
1988
Earthenware
74 x 48 x 10 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Vessel from the Genesis Series 1988
Earthenware
69 x 31 x 20 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Vessel from an Inscape circa 1988
Earthenware
54.5 x 43.2 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Painting in the Form a Bowl 1988
Earthenware
26.7 x 33.3 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Developed Bottle 1989
Earthenware
47 x 41 x 15 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Painting in the Form of a Bowl 1988
Earthenware
23 x 32 x 29 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Painting in the Form of a Bowl 1988
Earthenware
28.3 x 42 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Vessel from an Inscape 1989
Earthenware
40.5 x 37 x 41 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Blue Bowl in the Form of a Painting 1989
Earthenware
33.5 x 42 x 41 cm
Large Globular Vessel circa 1988
Earthenware
37.9 x 45.5 x 42 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Blue Vessel with Inverted Triangle 1989
Earthenware
67 x 72 x 16 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Flat Vessel with Signs 1989
Earthenware
69.5 x 49 cm
Nottingham City Museums and Galleries
Vessel from an Inscape 1989
Earthenware
35.2 x 35 x 30 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
White Vessel with Inverted Triangle 1989
Earthenware
71.5 x 55.5 x 19.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Earthenware
25 x 17 x 9 cm
White Vessel with Grid and Holes
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Ceramic, Drawings and Poetry
The 1990s were a decade of great change and accomplishment for Baldwin, most notably awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1992, the same year as Sculptor Dame Elisabeth Frink and Painter Howard Hodgkin. Baldwin ended a nearly 40-year teaching career at Eton College, retiring in 1996, signifying a shift in his life away from education – having already left all his others teaching positions – towards a focus on his artistic output.
Baldwin enjoyed five solo shows in the UK. At Galerie Besson in 1996, David Whiting describes: ‘There is nothing easy about these awkward voluminous vessels, seemingly unfixed in their form and dimensions (“they are no good to me if they are comfortable.... if a piece composes itself easily, it is no good” [Quote from Gordon Baldwin]), and if anything, that difficulty and tension has increased.’ He likens these new complexities to masters such as Picasso, delving ever deeper into their art only to uncover more questions to be answered. As such, the 90s see a move away from the architectural investigations of the 80s, in Developed Bottles and Axe forms, to an exploitation of surface through mark-making and colour on rounded and bulbous forms.
Baldwin was also included in a number of seminal group exhibitions through the 90s that interrogated the new making of contemporary British Studio ceramics: The Abstract Vessel, Oriel Gallery, Cardiff, Wales (1991,
curated by John Houston), The Raw and the Cooked, Barbican Art Gallery, London, UK (1993/94, curated by Alison Britton and Martina Margetts) and Pandora’s Box, Crafts Council, London, UK (1995, curated by Ewen Henderson). The latter of which promoted the handbuilt ceramic as a sculptural form, alongside any other sculptural material, asserting the place of clay amongst the posited fine arts.
A number of vessels from this decade and later are described as Pierced Vessels (page 154, 169, 175, 176, 240 and 241). The piercing is reminiscent of Lucio Fontana, who pioneered the Spatialism movement with his slashing of canvases and his own punctured ceramics. In painting, the slashing draws attention to the object-ness of the painting, that it is not mere surface but a full spatial object in its own right. The slashing brings the back of the canvas and the space behind the painted surface in to play with the front to break any sense of an illusional plane. For Baldwin, his pierced vessels enforce a similar assertion, the interior of the vessel is brought into play with the exterior and negates the importance of surface over form or any distinction or opposition between exterior or interior but draws the two together into a single unit. In fact, the dark slip works to compound this, distorting the surface and form into one object. However, the nature of the vessel pushes this assertion further. The formal success of a functional vessel relies on a sound body with the capacity to contain, a singular aperture in the
vessel, strategically placed allows access to the space within. Multiple piercings through the vessel walls negate any suggestion of the vessel’s functionality and draw our attention to the expected formal fundamentals of the vessel. Symbolically, this may be an attempt on Baldwin’s part to demystify that dark interior of the vessel, to allow as much access to it as possible and deny its distinction as a closed interior volume.
Almost in direct contradiction to the pierced vessels, the other works from the 90s are characterised by heavy gestural surface decoration and a proliferation of the vibrant blue that makes an appearance in this decade, influenced by Yves Klein. In these works, surface sits centre stage and the form acts as a canvas upon which Baldwin conducts exercises in mark-making. A number of surfaces are marked with grids, as if mapping the surface, and conjure images of geographical moon surveys.
In the 1990s, Baldwin made a teapot (page 169) that came closest to joining the aesthetic style of his sculptural works with the formal functionalities of his thrown works. The teapot was made at the request of Eton colleague and sculptor Bob Catchpole as a swap for one of his own sculptures (Catchpole collected teapots at the time). Catchpole recalls Baldwin’s undisguised reluctance at having to make a teapot, evident in the object’s obvious denial at being a functioning teapot with more in keeping with Baldwin’s
sculptural style. Two spouts jut out one side, akin to the thin spouts from the Developed Bottles of the previous decade, countered by an awkward angular handle, clearly made from rough extrusions. As if to nod towards functionality, Baldwin took the trouble to glaze the pot’s interior, the shiny surface visible on the unfinished spout ends. Countering further, the teapot’s hand-built body is asymmetrical and appears clumsy when compared to our collective internal visualisation of a perfectly rounded teapot. The matte black surface is scored across body, spout and handle with crisscrossed etchings, linking the work to much of Baldwin’s mark-making in the 90s.
45.2 x 53 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
White Vessel with Signs
1990
Earthenware
64.5 x 48 x 12 cm
Erskine, Hall & Coe
Cloud I circa 1990
Earthenware
65 x 46 x 15 cm
Collection of Brian Harding
Vessel from an Inscape
1990
Earthenware
30cm
Landesmuseum Württemberg
Small Vessel from an Inscape 1990
Earthenware
26 x 25 x 25 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Large Blue 1990
Earthenware
67 x 53 x 44 cm
Museum August Kestner
Black Vessel with Signs 1990
Earthenware
67 x 40 x 12.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Blue Bowl 1990
Earthenware
34 x 45 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Bowl 1990
Earthenware
28 x 38 cm
Sainsbury Centre
Monumental Bowl 1991
Earthenware
46.5 x 52 x 55 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Untitled 1990
Mixed media on paper
70.9 x 55 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
White Vessel with Signs 1990
Earthenware
71 x 50 x 15 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
White Vessel with Signs 1990
Earthenware
72 x 55 cm
Collection of Brian Harding
Black and White Monads
1991
Stoneware
71 x 13 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Monad
1991
Stoneware
73 x 24 x 10 cm
Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt
Vessel with Spiral 1993
Earthenware
45 cm high
Vessel from the Place of Stones
1992
Earthenware
29 x 40 x 26 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Vessel from the Place of Stones
1991
Stoneware
43.2 x 42 x 23 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Monad
1991
Earthenware
74 x 16 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Tall Vessel
62 x 20.8 x 8.7 cm
Collection of Brian Harding
Cygnus I 1992
Earthenware
79 x 23 x 22 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Duet 1992
Earthenware
70 x 13 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Extended Bowl 1992
Earthenware
12 x 21 x 27 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Sculptural Vessel Form 1992
Earthenware
28.5 x 22.5 x 18 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Sculpture in Two Parts 1992
Earthenware
45 cm high
Sculpture in Two Parts
1992
Earthenware
45.6 x 31.8 x 8.6 cm
Collection of Brian Harding
Pair of Vessels for Anish Kapoor
17.5 cm high
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Earthenware
34.3 x 44.5 x 20.3 cm
Vessel from an Inscape 1993
Earthenware
16 x 27 x 18 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Vessel from an Inscape 1993
Earthenware
35.5 cm wide
Crispin Kelly Collection
Sculpture in Two Parts 1992
Earthenware
40.6 x 24 x 9.5 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Leaning Vessel 1992
Stoneware
68.2 x 30.5 x 10 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Vessel from Enigma Series 1992
Earthenware
27.8 x 44 x 32.2 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Monad 1992
Earthenware
68 cm high
Crispin Kelly Collection
Vessel from an Inscape 1993
Earthenware
23 x 31 x 24 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Vessel from the Place of Stones 1994
Earthenware
41 x 53 x 23 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Enclosed Vessel with Signs 1992
Earthenware
18.7 x 45.2 x 31.7 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Dark Vessel 1995
Earthenware
50.5 x 26 x 16 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Dark Rocking Piece 1992
Earthenware
72 x 53.5 cm
Victoria and Albert Museum
Sculpture in Two Parts 1992
Earthenware
45.3 x 17.8 x 11.5 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Large Black Bowl with Torn Rim 1993
Earthenware
33 cm wide
Collection of Matthew Rice
Flat Vessel with Pierced Holes 1994
Earthenware
17 x 42 x 47 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Enclosed Vessel 1993
Earthenware
35.8 x 36.4 x 20.2 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Dark Rocking Form 1993
Earthenware
50.2 x 45.2 x 8.1 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Black Vessel 1994
Earthenware
34 x 35 x 23.5 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Teapot 1994
Earthenware
16.5 x 38 x 23 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Dark Vessel with Flange 1994
Earthenware
21.5 x 28 x 27 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Bulbous Sculpted Form
cm
Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology
Black Vessel 1994
Earthenware
33.5 x 34 x 22 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Bowl Form 1994
Earthenware
22.8 x 24.5 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Untitled Vessel 1994
Earthenware
30 x 31 cm
Collection of Angus
Graham-Campbell
Vessel 1994
Earthenware
27 x 40 x 40.5 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Three Bowls 1994
Earthenware 19 x 20 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Vessel in Shadow, Picasso Variation II 1994
Earthenware
19 x 36 cm
Painting in the Form of a Bowl with Piercing, Yellow and Blue Version 1995
Earthenware
21.5 x 32 cm
Shipley Art Gallery
Small
Earthenware
12 x 25 x 24 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Black Square with Grid
Earthenware
66 x 62 x 16 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Enclosed Form with Fin and Cross 1994
Earthenware
19.4 x 25.3 x 23.6 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Black Vessel with Grid
Earthenware
62 x 63 x 14 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
A Vessel from the Place of Stones
Earthenware
28.6 x 47.1 x 31.2 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Form with Cross
Vessel with Dark Signs 1995
Earthenware
26.5 x 38 x 12.7 cm
Diane and Marc Grainer Collection
White Vessel with Black Painting 1995
Earthenware
33.5 x 35.5 x 14 cm
Diane and Marc Grainer Collection
White Vessel with Drawing, V&A Ex
Earthenware
51.5 x 29 x 16.5 cm
Collection of Adrian
Large Bowl Form 1995
Stoneware
27 x 44.5 x 32 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Black Vessel with Grid 1995
Earthenware
16.5 x 45.7 x 48.2 cm
Diane and Marc Grainer Collection
Untitled 1995
Earthenware
49 x 57 x 45 cm
Eton College Collections
#3
Sassoon
Vessel Becoming Torso 1995
Earthenware
51 x 31 x 13 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Dark Vessel 1995
Earthenware
20.5 x 33.2 x 18 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Sculptured Form on Base 1995
Earthenware
Top: 30.3 x 20 x 7 cm, Base:
18 x 20.5 x 7.8 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Untitled circa 1990s
Earthenware
62 x 48 x 34.5 cm
Eton College Collections
Dark Figurative Vessel with Flange 1995
Earthenware
20 x 29 x 17.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Pierced Vessel circa 1995
Earthenware
44.5 x 36.9 x 18 cm
Collection of Brian Harding
The Anthony Shaw Collection
/ York Museums Trust
Enclosed Form with Cross 1995
Earthenware
15.4 x 32.3 x 25.5 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
White Pierced Bowl 1995
Earthenware
47.5 x 36 x 14.5 cm
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection
Round Vessel 1996
Earthenware
33 x 35.5 x 32.5 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Vessel with White Signs 1996
Earthenware
35.5 x 29 x 30.5 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Bowl Form 1995
Earthenware
36.6 x 40.5 x 33.8 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Sculptural Form with Blue Aperture 1995
Earthenware
18.8 x 27.5 x 20.5 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Pierced
Dark
A Domed Form 1995
Earthenware
23 x 43 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Untitled 1996
Earthenware
36 x 27 x 25 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Large Bowl Form 1995
Earthenware
27 x 44.5 x 32 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Flat Vessel 1996
Earthenware
49 cm high
The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge
Flat Form with Grid 1996
Earthenware
61 x 61.5 cm
The Mint Museum
Flat Vessel with Signs 1996
Earthenware
67 x 45 x 12.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Cloud II
Earthenware
60 cm high
White Vessel With Black Painting And Blue Slit 1996
Earthenware
38 cm high
Cloud Vessel with Rectangle 1997
Earthenware
24 x 40 x 28.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Round Vessel 1997
Earthenware
35 x 10.8 cm
The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge
Earthenware
37.4 x 30.5 cm
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery
White Bowl with Cross and Slits
Blue Cloud Vessel with Yellow Opening 1997
Earthenware
13.5 x 38 x 25.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Uneasy Vessel 1997
Earthenware
37cm diameter
Collection of Paul Greenhalgh
Earthenware 45 cm high
Earthenware
34.9 x 29.6 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Earthenware 18 cm high
Painting in the Form of a Bowl
Earthenware
27.5 x 40.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Tall Leaning Bowl
Blue Vessel
Blue Form
In Paris I 1997
Mixed media on paper
55 x 36.5 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
In Paris II 1997
Mixed media on paper
75 x 56 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Vessel with Black Geometry (Sky Grey III) 1998
Earthenware
23 x 39 x 33 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Cloudscape 1998
Earthenware 34 cm high
Crispin Kelly Collection
Round Vessel with Painting in Black and Blue (Vallauris I) 1998
Earthenware 41 cm high
1996
Earthenware 49 x 31 x 27 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Black Spout Pot
Wave II Bowl with Painting 1998
Earthenware
24.6 x 35.3 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Grey Vessel of the Sea 1997
Earthenware
14 x 46 x 34 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Small Cloud Vessel with Cross 1997
Earthenware
19.5 x 42 x 22 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Yellow Eye 1997
Earthenware
13 x 43 x 33 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Winged Abstract Vessel 1997
Earthenware
22.5 x 32 x 32 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Enclosed Flattened Vessel
1997
Earthenware
4.9 x 39.2 x 29.8 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Untitled 1997 Earthenware
31.5 x 30 x 29 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Flat Vessel with White Geometry II
1998
Earthenware
16 x 32.5 x 40 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Dark Vessel 1999
Earthenware
24 x 34 x 31 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Stack (IV) Broken Line 1998
Earthenware
119.2 x 13.8 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Fusion VI 1999
Earthenware
27 x 43 x 29 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Fusion VIII 1999
Earthenware
32.8 x 42 x 32 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Vessel with Yellow (Sky Grey I) 1998
Earthenware
25 x 42 x 30 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
37.5 x 19 x 12 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Dark Vessel (Spring Black I)
40 x 34.5 x 24 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
At the Time of Arches
1999
Charcoal on paper
66.5 x 91.9 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
White Standing Vessel
1998
Earthenware
46 x 32 x 13 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Bowl with Quick Drawing
Done Over a Long Period l
1999
Earthenware
32 x 46 cm
The Frank Cohen Collection
Vessel, Interpretation of Drawing III
1999
Earthenware
54 x 37 x 37 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Vessel (Tall Articulated Black I), Reach Black I and Vessel (Tall Articulated Black II)
1998
Earthenware
120 cm high
Emerging Vessel with Two Lines V
1999
Earthenware
63.4 x 34 x 10 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Dark Vessel (Spring Black III)
1998
Earthenware
31 x 29 x 18 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Vessel, Flat and Upright
Wind II
1998
Earthenware
46.7 x 44 x 14 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Horizontal Vessel (Black with Grids)
1998
Earthenware
16 x 36 x 30 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Bowl (with Black Painting) Wave I
1998
Earthenware
29 x 43.2 x 38.7 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
White Vessel with Numerals
1999
Earthenware
45 x 47 x 22 cm
Private Collection
Bowl with Drawing
1999
Earthenware
40 x 35.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Rhiw
1st September 1993 12.45
BRIGHT SUN FOOTPRINTS
STRANGERS
5 in 50 paces
Same direction
5 clockwise round
1st stone exposed
Film 2
Standing still Clockwise
Five directions
6 on its own
7 west then
8 east Sun south
9 rocks from 10
11 elsewhere
2nd September 1994
Squeeze clay and Make
The only Note at the Place of stones
Is it perhaps becoming only a Place of memories
Has it become a myth?
Mythological places cannot be visited
1995
Statements infer logic and Explanation. How can a Marvellous silence be explained Marvellous silences. The trees Have a silence. The stones of a Beach too. Silence has shape. But the process is inexplicable. There is a movement in the Body there is an openness In the mind. Events take place In the studio. Extremely privately (they seem to feed on anxiety) They take place without Chronology work seems to Stand still
19th October 1996
On drawing of two tall blue and black pieces with pyramid bases Staring at the blue above the yew And above the Acacia. Staring at the Blue through the branches of the yew It seem(s) caught in the tree
I am staring at the Northern Sky There is great intensity in the blue
1st October 1997
Again at the PLACE OF STONES In the middle of the night I put my head on the Beach. Above high water The sounds filled my skull Like sounds in a cave.
I found a Small pebble A line had little Holes along it
Vessel for Morandi
The Anthony Shaw Collection
York Museums Trust
Ceramic, Drawings and Poetry
In 2000 Gordon Baldwin was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal College of Art London, described as ‘held in international esteem, bringing distinction to [his] chosen discipline.’ Baldwin was only the seventh artist working in clay to receive this honour from the college, following the likes of Lucie Rie, Bernard Leach, Shoji Hamada, and Michael Casson.
Baldwin’s interest in the vessel and the defining of exterior and interior continued. Form became prevalent over surface or decoration, mark-making was minimal or appeared in tonally contrasted shapes that mimic or disguise the form’s contours. Otherwise, surfaces were full matt colour and Baldwin’s typical black and white palette was enlivened by deep blue and rich ochre yellows. The work oscillated between curvaceous organic forms that have a sense of fullness and more geometric assemblages that feel robust and uncompromising. Some exceptions to this are a series of tall flat vessels that have a mountainous profile, the closest Baldwin comes to a vase-type shape in these years, but within each there is a definite sense of an economy of form. The openings, that ensure the vessel association is maintained, become significantly smaller, inch-long piercings or hatches that seem almost precarious, in an attempt to preserve the fullness of the vessel. Some vessels are even topped with a stopper, a nod back to Baldwin’s lidded boxes of the 1970s, and demonstrate a clear effort to contain. The artist’s fascination with the mysterious interior has transformed into a determination to keep it there.
Vessels of the 2000s have a unique softness, they appear inflated but with direction, one edge tapered to a point or a wedge or a seam, they appear to move under external forces but are anchored by their physicality. An allusion could be made to drifting clouds and in 2008 Baldwin wrote a poem entitled ‘The Severity of Clouds,’ which in part reads:
Little hard
Clouds becoming
Vessels
Little hard clouds
Have become
Vessels
Vessels in
The form of
Little hard
Clouds
A clear influence from Arp’s poem that describes how, with the help of the Sculptor, ‘the cloud will descend, frolic on the ground and filled with self-confidence turn into stone.’ Here then, as with the Black Column with an Evening Shadow (1973) (page 50), Baldwin has attempted to capture the fleeting and ephemeral cloud into solid sculpted clay. These sculptures also echo Baldwin’s preoccupation with landscape, specifically the beach at Porth Neigwl in North Wales that Baldwin nicknamed ‘the place of stones’: ‘a beach of granite
boulders […] each one seemed like a sculpture when we came across them […] each rounded vessel I have made takes me back to that lonely place’ (David Whiting, Gordon Baldwin: Objects for a Landscape, 2012). The sculpture’s boulder-like quality creates an easy connection with these time-weathered pebbles and fulfils Arp’s poem as cloud becomes stone.
At the end of the decade, Baldwin exhibited with his wife Nancy Baldwin, a gifted painter, first at Ruthin Craft Centre in 2008 and later at Eton College in 2009. They had worked alongside each other since their meeting at Lincoln Art School, but this exhibition represented a ‘new phase in their creative partnership,’ as described in the catalogue. Collaborative works saw Gordon building vessels, that he described as ‘three-dimensional canvases,’ upon which Nancy applied her characteristic lyrical illustration (page 207, 216 and 219). Raef Baldwin, their son, recalls Nancy’s attempts to make her own pots upon which to paint, but the overt curves she was producing in clay were not melding with her drawn figures, and so Gordon constructed her some blank canvases upon which her drawings could shine. It was always a point of frustration for Gordon that Nancy did not receive the recognition as an artist he and many others believed she deserved. The collaborative works offered a platform upon which her work could be seen in a new light and drew together the forms of painting and ceramic, bringing to life Gordon’s long explored ‘painting in the form of…’. The results are colourful and lively vessels, upon which forms emphasise the curved
surface and continuous nature of the spherical form, lending itself to storytelling. They are reminiscent of ancient Greek or Roman vessels, in which characters move around and repeat as a narrative develops, a cyclical story. Their titles: Leda and the Swan, Scheherazade and Il Serraglio complement this sense of the chronicled tale.
Untitled 2001
Pencil on paper
56 x 39 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Nimbus VI
2000
Earthenware
38 x 54 x 30 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Developing Vessel
2000
Earthenware
37 x 44 x 26 cm
Private Collection
Kaspar’s Vessel I
2000
Earthenware
32.8 x 49.5 x 19.0 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
White Vessel with Six Holes
2000
Earthenware
46 x 46 x 19 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Horizontal Vessel III
2000
Earthenware
18.5 x 44 x 42 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Dark Grey Sea Vessel
2000
Earthenware
17 x 59 x 45 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Black Bowl with Relief
The Frank Cohen Collection
Fondazione Officine Saffi, Milan
Vessel (to Light a Dark Place II) 2001
Earthenware
30 cm high
Vessel According to Klee XI 2002
Earthenware
60 x 32 x 29 cm
York Museums Trust
Rocking Vessel (Ocean Geometry IV) 2001
Earthenware
16 x 48 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Sisyphos III 2001
Earthenware
38 cm wide
Dark Bottle with Lines and Fissures 2001
Earthenware
61.5 x 54 x 14 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Dark Bottle with Lines and Collage 2001
Earthenware
(L) 62 x 47 x 14.7 cm
(R) 62 x 50.5 x 14 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Rocking Vessel (Ocean I)
2001
Earthenware
24 x 51 x 35 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Anubis II (Tall Dark Blue Bottle)
2001
Earthenware
116 cm high
Alembic IV
2002
Earthenware
30 x 55 x 57 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Dark Vessel I
2001
Earthenware
58 x 38 x 35 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Sisyphos III
2001
Earthenware
23 x 41 x 39 cm
Collection of Adrian Sassoon
Alembic VI
2002
Earthenware
26 x 40 x 41 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Dark Bottle with Ridges
Crispin Kelly Collection
Vessel (To Light a Dark Place VI)
Corvi-Mora, London
Dark Vessel in December I
2003
Earthenware
40 x 53 x 31 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Black Alembic circa 2002
Earthenware
10.4 x 23.2 x 16.2 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Vessel (Vessel for Isis I)
2002
Earthenware
62 x 44 x 14.5 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Vessel (Between Spring and Summer I)
2002
Earthenware
38.2 x 45.1 x 44.6 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Vessel with Cross II
2002
Earthenware
25.4 x 50.9 x 39.1 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Vessel as Muse III
2003
Earthenware
55 x 50 x 32 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Black Double Vessel 2003
Earthenware
41 x 47 x 47 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Vessel for Isis II 2002
Earthenware
56.1 x 53.8 x 19.1 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Venus Love Trap Vessel II 2003–04
Earthenware
32 x 52.5 cm
Victoria and Albert Museum
Vessel According to Klee VI Second Dancer in Yellow 2002
Earthenware
52 x 42 x 21.4 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Vessel According to Klee VIII 2003
Earthenware
55 x 34 x 15 cm
Usher Gallery, Lincoln
Vessel from an Enigmatic Form 2003
Earthenware
44.5 x 47 cm
The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge
Vessel from the Sisyphus Series
2004
Earthenware
10.2 x 19.1 x 16.3 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Vessel for Dark Air
2002
Earthenware
64 x 42 x 62 cm
York Museums Trust
Untitled (decorated by Nancy Baldwin)
2004
Earthenware
26 x 27 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Asymmetries II
2003
Earthenware
61.5 x 46.5 x 32 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Vessel (Dore II)
2004
Earthenware
24 x 44 x 37 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Asymmetries I 2003
Earthenware
59.25 x 47 x 15.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Vessel for your Thoughts
Mr Brancusi IV
2003
Earthenware
37 x 42 x 36 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Covered Vessel circa 2000s
Earthenware
21 x 42 x 28 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Monumental Vessel
2008
Earthenware
67 x 51 x 23 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Vessel from a Quartet II
2004–05
Earthenware
50 x 50.5 cm
Victoria and Albert Museum
Unnamed Vessel with Stopper II
2004
Earthenware
43 x 48 x 43 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Unnamed Vessel with Stopper I
2004
Earthenware
50 x 40 x 51 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Double Vessel II
2004
Earthenware
45 x 54 x 14 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Unnamed Dark Vessel
2004
Earthenware
28.5 x 35 x 31.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Vessel According to Klee VII
2005
Earthenware
54 x 24 x 48 cm
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Dark Something Beside the Sea
2004
Earthenware
21.5 x 44 x 22 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Column II
2005
Stoneware
63 x 23 x 20 cm
Collection of Brian Harding
Column IV 2005
Earthenware
63.4 x 33.7 x 27 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Pale Vessel in November II
2004
Earthenware
22 x 36 x 27 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
An Alchemist’s Vessel VI
2006
Earthenware
38 x 35 x 28 cm
Ray Family Collection
Column I
2005
Earthenware
62.5 x 35 x 25 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Vessel from a Quartet II
2005
Earthenware
43.5 x 35.5 x 18 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
An Alchemical Vessel I (L) & An Alchemical Vessel II (R)
2005
Earthenware
(L) 61 x 51 x 31.5 cm
(R) 61 x 43.5 x 29 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Vessel Looking for a Place
2006
Earthenware
41.5 x 62 x 23.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Double Vessel
2005
Earthenware
43 x 32 x 32 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Such Dark Geometries I (L) & Such Dark Geometries II (R)
Earthenware
(L) 51 x 41 x 38 cm
(R) 51 x 41 x 48 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Vessel from the Place of the Alchemist I
2006
Earthenware
56.5 x 50.5 x 33 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Vessel From the Place of the Alchemist III
2006
Earthenware
56 x 49 x 25 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Vessel in the Form of Ancient Sound III
2007
Earthenware
49 cm wide
An Alchemist’s Vessel I
2006
Earthenware
36.9 x 32 x 30 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Large Vessel Form
2006
Earthenware
33.9 x 59.9 x 35.7 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Vessel Around a Square II
2007
Earthenware
63 x 40 x 21 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
2000 to 2010
I make vessels of clay like poets make poems of words.
I start with blurred images and engage with a mysterious alchemy. They grow of shimmers and whispers in the quiet studio amongst the darkness and the silences and spaces between the work already done. I am aware of a darkness. Do I find my pieces in the wilderness or do I take them to the wilderness to react with the water and space.
I both observe them and am them. Their silences react with the silences of wildernesses which often refer to bleak spaces. I have spent a lot of time on wild beaches in North Wales, I have found great energy there.
I think these places in Wales have become my mythology.
My mythic landscape or my inscape is given shape by my vessels.
The vessels gain significance from my inscape and give significance
A bird’s call will mark an internal landscape forever.
A remembered wind will shape a beach.
I clapped my hands and make a sculpture of a flock of blackbirds Flying.
We found our place in Wales with a pin. We let chance play a role. Once there we looked for emotional correspondences in the landscape at the edge of the sea.
A piece works for me, as I say, when it crystallizes into significant yet unexplainable form
The vessels are resolved in the studio and in the mythic wilderness of my inner space as dark as the inside of a stone
The darkness inside a stone is inside of me. I have made vessels to light a dark place.
Vessels mark the oceans with their sailings
I write about now and not as it was with me a few decades ago
I work as it is now and not as it was then. I remember how it was like a stranger remembering.
The meanings of my vessels is discovered. I find myself saying something. I do not have something to tell the viewer.
If the pieces are so hard-won they could have an effect elsewhere perhaps.
July 2008
Sketches of clouds
The trees are uneasy
Everywhere birds sing
The roses are silent
I clapped my hands
The blackbirds flew I had made a Sculpture
The sculpture flew
Studio is empty I left (too)
The severity of clouds
Little hard
Clouds becoming Vessels
Little hard clouds
Have become Vessels
Vessels in The form of
Little hard
Clouds
Clouds move West to east
The buzzard calls
Clouds move west
To east. The buzzard
Calls from the blue
This is a cloud I Watched crossing above
The town garden
A Vessel Looking for a Place to Be (Page of V&A
150th anniversary album)
2007
Charcoal and Pen on Paper
29.7 x 42 cm
Victoria and Albert Museum
2007
Earthenware
33 x 51 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
2008
Earthenware
35 x 31 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Untitled (decorated by Nancy Baldwin)
2007
Earthenware
33 x 30 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Untitled (decorated by Nancy Baldwin)
2007
Earthenware
35 x 25 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Made a Sculpture of Flying Birds
2007
Charcoal on Paper
55.8 x 78.7 cm
Diane and Marc Grainer Collection
Untitled (decorated by Nancy Baldwin)
Untitled (decorated by Nancy Baldwin)
Vessel in the Form of an Ancient Sound I
Earthenware
50 x 46 cm
Victoria and Albert Museum
x 33 x 24 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Untitled (decorated by Nancy Baldwin)
2007
Earthenware
35 x 30 cm
Collection of Angus Graham-Campbell
Vessel Around a Square I
2008
Earthenware
42.5 x 43 x 29 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
A Dancer with Strange Companions
Gordon Baldwin & Nancy Baldwin
2009
Earthenware
31.4 x 29.7 x 27.4 cm
Eton College Collections
A Vessel Around a Square II
2007
Earthenware
44.5 x 37.4 x 14.2 cm
Image courtesy of MAAK
Vessel Around a Square II
2008
Earthenware
45 x 44.5 x 31 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Vessel Around a Square III
2008
Earthenware
43 x 45 x 27 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Deauville 27. VIII. 08
Aberdaron
18.X.08
Walking at 8.36 am
The sun just over the headland
The shadow 20 meters long
Above my shadow the moon
Many sheep on the summit
Too many to count
Quotes
The poem arrives in A coinciding moment
Of language and energy
Gillian Clark
Concentration
A poem is a way Of forgetting how you Came to write it
Randell Jarell critic
The process for Most writers is deeply Mysterious and some
Attempt has to (be) made to
Preserve the mystery
Don Paterson
I do not have a formula
For writing poems. Trying to Write another good poem
By recreating the circumstances
And repeating the techniques
That allowed you to write
The last one is a(s) daft as Making love in the Same situation, at the Same time and in the Same position in the hope
That you might recreate
A child with the same physique
And personality as the last
Don Paterson
Your relationship With poems is completely Obsessive
Don Paterson
A poem is being willed Into existence rather than Choosing me to bring it
To life
On opening the notebook
If it’s going to be a poem I do not immediately
Understand what I have written I do not understand because it is not telling me something I already know… and know it has come from elsewhere.
Open to the Sky I
Earthenware
54 cm high
Crispin Kelly Collection
Helen Walsh
Gordon gave himself the title ‘Gordon of Clay’ during the period between 2007-2013, when we worked together on the touring retrospective exhibition and book Gordon Baldwin: Objects for a Landscape, which was organised by York Art Gallery and funded by Arts Council England. Whenever I rang Gordon, his wife Nancy, herself a talented painter working from a studio on the top floor of their Georgian house in Shropshire, would usually answer. She would call down to Gordon in his basement studio: “It’s Helen of York.” We soon began signing off our correspondence as from Gordon of Clay or Helen of York
This essay considers the crucial period at the beginning of Baldwin’s artistic development through his selfreflective exhibition Excitations. Baldwin was invited to select from the York Museums Trust’s collections for an exhibition at York Art Gallery in 2011, in advance of his retrospective exhibition tour which launched in 2012, marking his 80th year. Through Excitations we see how he explored what other artists and potters were doing and thinking during his quest to be a Modern artist. Rather than an exhibition curated by Baldwin, it is perhaps more appropriate to describe Excitations as an extension of his creative practice as an artist. He often refers to journeys when describing his work: “Each pot is a journey to a new place and if a series develops, and it often does, each new piece further explores that place.”1 His way of working in series means he is familiar with groups of objects or vessels that sit together or apart, occupying a physical space, be that his studio during their creation or in the many exhibitions he has
taken part in during his career. His eye for placing and presenting objects is sharply honed, the geometry of arrangement, the negative spaces between the works and the views and vistas they create through a gallery are as important as the objects, as are the silences to the avant-garde composers he admired such as John Cage (1912-1992).
The title of the exhibition was as important to him as the titles he gave his work: “I use them as signposts as well as verbal objects, to be placed beside the pot.”2 Settling on Excitations, Baldwin responded to the content of the collections, seeing the opportunity to focus on influences which led to clay becoming his main medium of choice. As Baldwin explained in his introduction to the exhibition: “When I was a student at London’s Central School of Art and Design, I thought of myself as a painter who was also studying and enjoying pottery. The work I have chosen for this exhibition is the type that affected me during that period and partly brought about the moment when I hung up my palette.”3
The planning of the exhibition was mostly done by phone calls and exchanged letters, with the notes and letters evolving into the labels for the exhibition. Baldwin wielded a pen with as much grace and power as he did his hands, potter’s tools, or pieces of charcoal. There was such clarity and relatability in his reasoning for selecting each piece, that there was no need to edit or adapt his words - to do so would dilute the wisdom and passion they revealed. Baldwin’s vision for Excitations had a strong focus from the start and
Gordon of Clay by
following initial conversations with him, I sent him a plan of the exhibition space and a list of all the artists we had in the contemporary ceramics collection, along with an indication of the extent of our historical and archaeological collections. From these lists he chose the artists and types of work he was particularly interested in and I then posted an envelope of images of the objects by each to choose from. Baldwin’s knowledge and familiarity with the artists and objects was so extensive that he had no need to see them in the flesh to make a choice. The final object list comprised of work by twelve contemporary ceramic artists, two sculptors, several historical works and a new piece by Baldwin, gifted to York Art Gallery for the exhibition. Consisting of only 37 works compared to a previous exhibition that had included 150, it was a salutary example of the aphorism “less is more,” evocative of Modern architectural concerns, and demonstrated how the choice of a few strong pieces of art positioned with care can command both the space and visitors’ attention.4 [1]
In one of his notebooks, Baldwin wrote: “Events recollected imitate like painting. The recollections ever explored and established as new events…”5 Excitations acted in a similar way, with the artists and their work prompting memories for Baldwin. At Lincoln School of Art, Baldwin was taught drawing by the Czech artist Tony Bartl (1912-1998) and pottery by Bob Blatherwick (1920-1993). Baldwin credits Blatherwick with introducing him to the work of the great 17th century slipware potter Thomas Toft, which inspired Baldwin’s
exam piece. Baldwin chose a Tyg (a multi-handled drinking vessel) decorated with the exuberant, gestural slip trailing by Toft for the exhibition. [2] Blatherwick also encouraged Baldwin to visit an exhibition of work by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Though Baldwin was determined to be a Modern painter, under Blatherwick’s guidance, he began to see ceramics as a continuing tradition connecting the past and present, but, importantly, as something that could be very contemporary, expressive, and sculptural.
After leaving Lincoln School of Art in 1951, Baldwin moved to London to study. Grant aid funding for study away from home was only available if the local college didn’t teach the subject you were interested in, so he applied to study Industrial Ceramics at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. It was a great time to be part of the London art school system. The UK was in recovery following the Second World War and there was a new sense of optimism and an interest in modern art and design taking hold. Dora Billington (1890-1968), Head of Ceramics at the Central, encouraged her students to pursue a new exploratory and forwardthinking approach to pottery rather than Bernard Leach’s Anglo-Oriental doctrine. Baldwin found Leach’s direction troubling because of its lack of modernity, nor was he entirely comfortable with an Englishman taking ownership of the Oriental ceramics’ philosophy. He knew he could not be ignored though and had enjoyed Leach’s A Potter’s Book, first published in 1940. Baldwin selected The Leaping Salmon vase for the exhibition,
[2] Tyg
Thomas Toft circa 1680
Earthenware
19.5 x 18.5 cm
York Museums Trust
[5]
Pair of Bottles
William Newland 1960
Stoneware (L) 36 x 8.6cm
(R) 24.2 x 9.5 cm
York Museums Trust
[3]
Mei Ping Vase
Shoji Hamada 1923
Stoneware 26 x 11.4 cm
York Museums Trust
[4]
Dish with Orchids
Tomimoto Kenkichi 1930
Porcelain, wood and cotton [Dish] 3.6 x 22.6 cm
York Museums Trust
Thomas Samuel Haile
1936
Stoneware
15.1 x 34.1 cm
York Museums Trust
Lucie Rie 1966
Porcelain
6.5 x 10.9 cm
York Museums Trust
[6] Roman Baths
[7] Bowl
Coper
a work widely thought to be Leach’s masterpiece, along with two panels of tiles which demonstrated Leach’s brushwork skills. Baldwin was interested in the philosophy of artists and liked the idea of living an artistic life. He admired potters like Harry Davis (19101986), who lived their lives without artifice and in the spirit of country potters, but were intellectuals and able to articulate their views. When he first saw the pottery of Shoji Hamada (1894-1978) and Tomimoto Kenkichi (1886-1963) in the flesh, he immediately recognised them as the real thing, describing Hamada as: “exotic and surrounded by a poetic aura.” He found Hamada and Kenkichi inspiring, writing: “People who are confident in their work and their tradition increase the confidence of students like me, generating those moments of I CAN DO SOMETHING.”6 [3 and 4]
The post-war period was a melting pot of new ideas and experimentation with artists and designers at the centre. In 1950, the Arts Council exhibition Picasso in Provence toured the UK, comprising of approximately eighty exhibits of which a quarter were ceramics (Baldwin saw the show at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge). Its success led to a further Arts Council exhibition in 1957 titled Picasso Ceramics, which brought his ceramics firmly to the attention of the British public. The brightly coloured tin-glazed earthenware pots, with their expressive, modern decoration playing with themes of surrealism, anthropomorphism, and optical illusions, were both shocking and inspirational. Baldwin chose a bowl by Picasso with a bullfighting scene inside for
Excitations. With many of his bowls and plates, Picasso decorated them as if they were a canvas, often creating liminal effects between two and three dimensions. The bowl form became a vehicle that Baldwin has made his own through his more abstractly decorated Paintings in the Form of a Bowl series, which he has repeatedly returned to and further developed over the years. As Picasso approached the bowl form from his background as a painter, Baldwin also saw his series as paintings that became bowls.7 Australian émigré William Newland (1919-1998), another of Baldwin’s teachers at Central, became absorbed by Picasso’s ceramic work during a trip to Southern France in 1949 with Margaret Hine and Nicholas Vergette. On their return they formed the Bayswater Group, producing tin-glazed and slip trailed earthenware pots and tiles. Leach mockingly referred to them as the Picassoettes, but Newland was not insulted and accepted the name with pride, saying: “one was fantastically Picassoesque.”8 Baldwin recalled Newland “found a muscular enjoyment in working with clay, which was enthusing and sexy. I could not be what he was, but on the rebound, was nudged towards what I was.”9 [5]
Determined to be a Modern artist, specifically an Abstract Expressionist, Baldwin visited the exhibitions of practising artists who were working with clay in a modern way whilst he was studying in London. Artists such as Sam Haile (1909-1948) whose early death meant Baldwin only caught a brief glimpse of his surreal ceramics and paintings, [6] and James Tower (1919-1988) who had also been a student of Newland
at the Central in 1948 and whose work combined expressiveness and utility. Baldwin knew by that point that it was possible to use clay to produce work that was modern art and not just domestic and functional pieces, and that he was not the only one with such ambition.
Another aspect of the post-war period, particularly the 1950s, that inspired excitement was the émigré potters from Europe now based in the UK and producing a new modern style of functional pottery that was very different to the traditional English and Oriental wares that Leach championed. European artists such as Lucie Rie (1902-1995) and Hans Coper (1920-1981), offered a new and modern way of working which appealed to Baldwin, who described Rie as the European antidote to Leach. [7 and 8] Baldwin chose three pieces by Coper which particularly excited him as they reminded him of encountering pieces of Coper’s work illustrated in Muriel Rose’s 1955 book Artist Potters in England and its 1970 edition. Baldwin said of Coper: “I made nothing influenced by him, but he was a beacon.”10
Whilst he was in London exploring the work of contemporary artists, he also had on his doorstep the wealth of historical works available in the capital’s museums and galleries. English Medieval jugs for example, were a huge source of inspiration. Baldwin admired their strong sense of spirit and stature, and in his final year at the Central, he made some large, coiled pots, the shapes of which were based on medieval jugs. [9] They were so big that they became a cause célèbre
One of Baldwin’s heroes is the potter William Staite Murray (1881-1962). Murray was one of the early studio potters working in the 1920s and the 1930s. He had strong views about the status of ceramics, believing it to be the missing link between painting and sculpture as it combined both.11 He exhibited alongside artists such as painter Ben Nicholson (1894-1982) and sculptor Henry Moore (1898-1986), gave his pots titles and charged exorbitant art market prices for them. For Baldwin, Staite Murray demonstrated that it is possible to be a potter and an Artist. York Art Gallery has the largest collection of pots by Staite Murray in public ownership, most of which were a bequest from Dean Eric MilnerWhite (1884-1963), one of the first collectors of British studio pottery and also Staite Murray’s most important patron. Milner-White’s collection includes two iconic anthropomorphic jars by Staite Murray which Baldwin selected for the Excitations exhibition, writing that: “These pots acted as a pivot and helped me sort out some of my muddled thoughts.”12 One of the jars with an ethereal cream glaze is named Kwan Yin [10] after the Chinese Buddhist goddess of compassion, Guanyin; the other jar, decorated in bold monochrome stripes is titled The Bather. [11] Baldwin gave very specific instructions on the display of these jars, asking that they be shown alongside examples of English Medieval jugs, lined up like “soldiers in rank, handles to the rear with the two Staite Murrays at either end like Sergeant Majors”.13 One tall baluster jug had a very rounded base resulting in an extreme lean which, for Baldwin, recalled the memory of fainting whilst on parade when he was doing National Service at Oswestry, Shropshire in 1954.14
[9] Gordon Central School of Art London
[10]
Kwan Yin
William Staite Murray 1937-1939
Stoneware
101.8 x 23.5 cm
York Museums Trust
We borrowed two bronze sculptures, both abstract heads, for the exhibition, one by Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) and one by William Turnbull (1922-2012). They enabled Baldwin to describe the important role the artists played in his development, in the object’s label he stated emphatically in capitals: “PAOLOZZI & TURNBULL GAVE ME CONFIDENCE AS AN ARTIST.”15 Visiting exhibitions of their work, Baldwin felt they were gods and that he was extremely fortunate to have been taught by such important artists.16 He recognised that alongside practical abilities, they gave him ephemeral skills such as how to think and how to question. Turnbull taught Baldwin an exploratory way of working to develop ideas, whilst Paolozzi was proof that an artist didn’t have to restrict their work to one medium, material or method, they both ignored the traditional rules and boundaries of how artists should work.17
Baldwin gifted York Art Gallery an unusual piece of his work for the exhibition. Titled Kaspar’s Goblet (page 243), it offers an intimate insight into the way Baldwin works in his studio: “There is a sculpture by Max Ernst (1891-1976). It is called Kaspar. It gives me the creeps!! All pieces that stand away from me like strangers are known as Kaspar’s Vessels. They are always what I call STRANGER Vessels. My life is littered by Stranger Vessels. They tend to stay in the studio. This Goblet has got out into the world.”18
The power of Baldwin’s work is in its ability to affect the space it sits within and the feelings of people who encounter it, himself included. The first ceramic I encountered at York Art Gallery when I began work there was Baldwin’s piece, Vessel for Dark Air (page 207) from 2002 which the gallery had recently purchased. It seemed to float, glowing and ghost-like in the dark gloomy store, its surface soft and luminous, with a tender finger wipe on the shoulder. The gaping opening filled me with fear though. The black glazed interior with no edges visible offering no indication of its contents. I had the thought that if I put my hand inside, something very nasty would happen to it. When I learned the title of the work, Vessel for Dark Air, it just seemed perfect and it remains for me one of the most powerful pieces in York’s collection. The feelings the piece provoke are feelings Baldwin himself feels about the Dark Air Series, as he explained: “All my work over the last few years has been wrested out of a darkness. It is more sombre and challenging. I think being older has something to do with it. All my work is on the subject of vessels. Vessels hold materials, this vessel holds dark air. The forms of these vessels are awkward and I found them menacing. They filled my studio with their dark silences. I think if you feel foreboding, I agree with you, though as usual, I didn’t set out on that particular journey with that outcome in mind. It was an exploration, artist as explorer is the attitude I take in the studio.”19
All his vessels are on a continuing journey.
1 Baldwin, G. N. (2012) ‘In the Studio’, p44, in Whiting, D (ed.)
Gordon Baldwin: Objects for a Landscape. York: York Museums Trust.
2 Baldwin, G. N. (2012) ‘In the Studio’, p44, in Whiting, D (ed.)
Gordon Baldwin: Objects for a Landscape. York: York Museums Trust.
3 Exhibition text for Excitations, York Art Gallery (15 October 2011 –31 December 2012).
4 “Less is more” has been incorrectly attributed to the German American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), who adopted this ideal of minimalist modernism in his designs.
5 Gordon Baldwin’s Black notebook 1997-2012.
6 Exhibition text for Excitations, York Art Gallery (15 October 2011 –31 December 2012).
7 Conversation between Gordon Baldwin and Helen Walsh in 2011
8 Jones, J. (2000) ‘In Search of the Picassoettes’, Interpreting Ceramics (published online 2000). Available at: http://www. interpretingceramics.com/issue001/picasso/picasso.htm (Accessed 2024).
9 Exhibition text for Excitations, York Art Gallery (15 October 2011 –31 December 2012).
10 Exhibition text for Excitations, York Art Gallery (15 October 2011 – 31 December 2012).
11 Murray, W.S. (1925) ‘Pottery from the Artist’s Point of View’, Artwork, Vol.1, No.4, May/August 1925, p201.
12 Exhibition text for Excitations, York Art Gallery (15 October 2011 – 31 December 2012).
13 Exhibition text for Excitations, York Art Gallery (15 October 2011 – 31 December 2012).
14 Conversation between Gordon Baldwin and Helen Walsh in 2011.
15 Exhibition text for Excitations, York Art Gallery (15 October 2011 – 31 December 2012).
16 Harrod, T. (1989) ‘Sources of Inspiration’, Crafts, No. 96, January/ February 1989, p44-45.
17 Harrod, T. (1989) ‘Sources of Inspiration’, Crafts, No. 96, January/ February 1989, p45.
18 Exhibition text for Excitations, York Art Gallery (15 October 2011
– 31 December 2012).
19 Undated and unaddressed letter in archives of York Art Gallery.
Image credits
[1] © York Museums Trust.
[2] © York Museums Trust. Photograph: Philip Sayer.
[3] © The Estate of Shoji Hamada/York Museums Trust. Photograph: Philip Sayer.
[4] © The Estate of Tomimoto Kenkichi/York Museums Trust. Photograph: Philip Sayer.
[5] © The Estate of William Newland/York Museums Trust. Photograph: Philip Sayer.
[6] © The Estate of Thomas Samuel Haile/York Museums Trust. Photograph: Philip Sayer.
[7] © Lucie Rie/York Museums Trust. Photograph: Philip Sayer.
[8] © The Estate of Hans Coper/York Museums Trust. Photograph: Philip Sayer.
[9] Photo courtesy of Baldwin family archive.
[10, 11] © By permission of the family of William Staite Murray/York Museums Trust. Photograph: Philip Sayer.
[11]
The Bather
William Staite Murray
70.8 x 14.7 cm
Museums Trust
Corvi-Mora, London
Ceramic, Drawings and Poetry
The works in this decade are characterised by tall thin forms, more obviously hand built and with an undulating and uneven surface that suggest the presence of the artist’s hand more so than in previous decades. There is a sense that these works have returned to a totemic quality of earlier years but characterised now by Baldwin’s simplified economy of form. Many appear botanical or geological, like hollowed trunks, their mouths more open and gaping, others like stoppered tapering turrets. Edges are torn or pinched, or else cut sharply into a stark finish, like the human hand interfering with nature. Surfaces are almost void of decoration, with only subtle gridded marks, piercings or appliqués of thin clay shapes, and greater focus is on texture and flat colour.
In 2012, the York Art Gallery hosted the retrospective exhibition ‘Gordon Baldwin: Objects for a Landscape’, coinciding with and celebrating the permanent loan of Anthony Shaw’s collection to the York Art Gallery, the largest single collection of the artist’s work. Baldwin’s most expansive retrospective to date, the exhibition featured over 100 works from his extensive career and a selection of new works as the artist approached his 80th birthday. The exhibition took landscape as a key point of assessment for Baldwin’s work showcasing drawings, collages and photographs alongside his sculptures.
The retrospective, coupled with his curated exhibition ‘Excitations’ in which Baldwin selected works from the
York Art Gallery collection to explore his early influences, offered the artist the opportunity to look back across his own career, a task he considered with some sobriety. Baldwin said, “thinking about the past, raking about the past, I was feeling a bit like a person with a great deal of past and not much future” (Financial Times, 15 February 2012). In his 2012 sketchbook notes are made for an introductory talk on 35 years of work:
I know less where to go the more I work
Pieces slip in and out of focus
They represent slit-like openings
Then I am more aware of the wall
And of barriers
It is much easier to talk about my earlier work
Than what I am doing now
So I will start with the more difficult task
Words describing or explaining have
A habit of taking over and then altering
The thing described
And wrongly stand
For it
Baldwin continued making sculptural ceramics until the mid-decade when unfortunately, his sight began to deteriorate and, although drawing had been a large part of his process throughout his career, he turned back to the sketchbook to continue his artistic journey.
Baldwin’s drawings have always been conducted in charcoal on paper as gestural, energetic exercises in mark-making. Some appear like degraded inscriptions of devolved alphabets, some wholly abstract, as automatic movements, others have more obvious connections to landscape and seascape. Always they have a sense of rhythm, almost notational as if conducted to a melody, linking to Baldwin’s deep interest in alternative and improvised music. Words became increasingly prominent, as titles, observations and ruminations on his subject matter, taking over from the sketchbook poetry prevalent in earlier decades.
Today, Baldwin has ceased making entirely, stating ‘I don’t do art therapy’ but, in an artistic world where the use of clay and ceramic is progressively sculptural and studio pottery gains an increasingly wide audience, his work is as relevant as ever. Henry Rothschild once said of Baldwin: “Gordon you’re alright, you will always be remembered because you’ve made your own monuments.” (Barker, 2015)
Crucible with Black Rectangles 2010
Earthenware
67.7 x 28.3 x 18.6 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Painting in the Form of a Tall Vessel II 2010
Earthenware
59 x 23.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Painting in the Form of a Tall Vessel I
Earthenware
60.5 x 23.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Line Below Haiku 2011
Charcoal on paper
64 x 52 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
White Vessel Study III 2010
24 x 23 cm
Untitled (decorated by Nancy Baldwin) 2010
Earthenware
Crispin Kelly Collection
Ceramic 24 x 34 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Untitled Grey II
2010
Earthenware
27 x 42 x 37 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
White Vessel Study II 2010
Earthenware
27 x 36 x 34.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Untitled Grey III
2010
Earthenware
26 x 42.5 x 38.5 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
White Vessel Study I 2010
Earthenware
15 x 36 x 34 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Untitled Grey I 2010
Earthenware
30 x 42.5 x 36 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Boulder Form
Undated, acquired 2010
Earthenware
55 cm wide
Collection of Matthew Rice
Buds are Bursting Series III
2012
Earthenware
38.5 x 46 x 31 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Buds are Bursting Series I
2012
Earthenware
38 x 50 x 26 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Blue and Pierced Vessel II
2012
Earthenware
63 x 40.5 x 16.5 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Buds are Bursting Series II
2012
Earthenware
39 x 47 x 27 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Vessels as Signals I
2013
Earthenware
60 x 23 x 16 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Vessels as Signals II
2013
Earthenware
64 x 19 x 10 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Blue and Pierced Vessel I 2012
Earthenware
64 x 40 x 11.5 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Vessel for a Sculptor I
2013
Earthenware
51 x 20.5 x 12 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Vessels as Signals I
2013
Earthenware
75 x 25 x 14 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Vessel for a Sculptor II
2013
Earthenware
58 x 22 x 14 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Vessels as Signals II
2013
Earthenware
79 x 20 x 23 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Vessel for a Sculptor III
2013
Earthenware
68 x 20 x 13 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Vessels as Signals III
2013-2014
Earthenware
76 x 25 x 13 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Vessel for a Sculptor IV
2013
Earthenware
65.5 x 26 x 13 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Vessel for Pomona II
2013
Earthenware
53.5 x 23.5 x 17.5 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Vessel in Black and White with Chevron
2012
Earthenware
62 x 40.5 x 15.5 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Vessel for Pomona I (Black) 2013
Earthenware
52 x 26 x 23 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Round Vessel in Black with Relief
2012
Earthenware
39 x 42 x 39 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Vessels as Signs III (L), Vessels as Signs II (C), Vessels as Signs I (R)
2013
Earthenware (L) 61 x 17 x 12 cm
(C) 63 x 26 x 17 cm (R) 63 x 23 x 17 cm
The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
Vessel for
2012
Earthenware (L) 66 x 21 cm (C) 56 x 19 cm (R) 63cm x 20 cm
Crispin Kelly Collection
Kaspar’s Goblet
2011
Earthenware
37.5 x 28 cm
York Museums Trust
Blue
Pomona I, II, III
Vessel from Pomona Series II (L) & Vessel from Pomona Series I (R) 2014
Earthenware
(L) 64 x 22 cm
(R) 62 x 25 cm
Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust
The
Blue Pomona I
2013-2014
Earthenware
64.5 x 20 x 16 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Blue Pomona II
2013-2014
Earthenware
64 x 24.5 x 19 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Blue Pomona III
2013-2014
Earthenware
63 x 25 x 18.5 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
Vessel for Pomona III (Black) 2013-2014
Earthenware
63 x 20 x 16 cm
Corvi-Mora, London
All works: Charcoal on paper, courtesy Corvi-Mora, London unless otherwise stated.
Gordon Baldwin Inscape
Field, Bell, Sky 2015
Untitled 2015
Remember They Gather 2016
They Fly Listen 2016
Gordon Baldwin
Four Lines Drawn Slowly 2016 Floating Haiku 2016
Ceramic, drawings and poetry
Listen. Pyramids! 2016
Crosses, Flying, Silence 2016
Baldwin
Drawn on Saturday 2016
Did Solon Visit the Pyramids 2016
Ceramic, drawings and poetry
Many Little Crosses - Listen 2016 Works in March 2016
Gordon Baldwin Inscape
Captured Cloud 2015
Looping Along on Sunday 2016
Cross, Silence 2016 Lines 2016
Black Slanting 2016
Another Black Slanting 2016
Look He Said, Crosses Flying 2016 Crossing Carefully 2016
Gordon Baldwin
Haiku in the Sky 2016 In March 2016
Counting One, Two, Three, Four 2016
Gordon Baldwin Inscape
Crossing 2016 Quiet Lines 2016
Look Solon, the Pyramids 2016
Nowhere I 2016
Making Marks Slowly 2016
Drawing Lines in Silence 2016
Marks Around an Empty Square of Sky 2017
2017
Fragments of Voices Perhaps 2017
Listen Solon and Then Tell 2017
Little Sky Marks
Beginning at 3:48 pm 2017
Do I Hear a Japanese Flute 2017
Marking and Marking a Small Square Of Sky 2017
A Form of Silence
Sometimes There Is Too Much Bird Song
He Tries to Capture It by Writing
drawings and poetry
When the Distant Voices... 2018
When the Distant Voices... 2018
Imagine Marks on the Sky, They Have Sound 2017
I Think I Hear a Shakuhachi 2017
That Fragments Go Here 2020
Arching on Sunday 2018
When the Birds Began to Sing, Do Not Listen Please 2020
Hear It, Hear It Darkly 2020
Ceramic, drawings and poetry
Dark Script 2020 Oh 2020
Gordon Baldwin
Lines from Left to Right
Under a Slanted Sky
Slanted Sky Over
A Place for Fragments with Small Sounds Perhaps 2021
Bird Song, Full of Memories 2021
Signatures on a Sunday undated
Writing in October undated
Gordon Baldwin Inscape
Ceramic, drawings and poetry
Untitled undated
They Are Flying undated
Ceramic, drawings and poetry
Untitled undated
Silence. Darkness. Lines Becoming Waves Perhaps undated
End with Rain undated
28.VIII.10
Deauville
Thundering about “Water Vessels.”
Thinking that I should make more Perhaps.
Thinking that the Water is black.
Thinking that Water has a Darkling surface
Thinking HOW
29.VIII. 10
Deauville Grey bright Breezes
Still thinking About water Vessels in blacks
No New ideas Here Can only sit in This new place And look at the Pieces in my Studio
I think my Way from one piece to the next
I look at them
In the studio without Me Away thinking
2012 March, Aberdaron
A crinkly grey
Sea
Walking by its
Edge
The wind is cold
Thoughts scatter
My head becomes
Thoughtless stone
High tide
Walking by waves
A drowned sheep
Silent for yesterdays
Skylarks
Early memories to write down
One day
The blue lake quarry
By the Buddlea in the back garden
The mist on the beach
The aeroplane
Shelling peas
35 years of work:
I know less where to go the more I work
Pieces slip in and out of focus
They represent slit-like openings
Then I am more aware of the wall
And of barriers
It is much easier to talk about my earlier work
Than what I am doing now
So I will start with the more difficult task
Words describing or explaining have
A habit of taking over and then altering
The thing described
And wrongly stand
For it
Gordon with his pipe
Image courtesy of the Baldwin Family
As a keen collector of Gordon’s work, I am continually struck by its variety and scope. With the range of his practice assembled here, it is possible to distinguish the broad arc of its development.
Gordon Baldwin set out as a young man to be an artist, and he was first drawn to painting. Over time, he became more interested in sculpture and his art education led him to clay.
Naturally in his early decades his work in clay is intended as traditional sculpture: he often incorporates plinths in works that are assemblages of components, frequently arranged on a plane.
At the same time, the wheel-thrown work he made for his Christmas sales over the years are a constant reminder of the potter’s forms: dishes, bowls and chalices.
As the 60s turned into the 70s the work develops organically to include the concept of the vessel in each of them: the sculptures are hollow and have an opening, they are containers. Gordon’s painterly instincts are always to the fore in the careful and considered mark-making on their surfaces.
By the beginning of the 90s and continuing into his late career, the three threads in his work – painting, sculpture and clay – become melded and impossible to untangle. Bases and plinths are now absorbed into a single form, surface treatment is intrinsic to the work rather than its own message, and the work intrigues with a sense of interior life: altogether a fulfilment of his first ambition.
Crispin Kelly
Testimonials
For forty-five years or so I have studied, collected and sold ceramics thanks to being taught about clay and ceramic techniques by Mr. Baldwin at school.
I haven’t made a piece since 1976-78 when I was taught for two hours a week by Gordon Baldwin. There was no examination at the end of my time in the studio, just a lot of pots and sculptures that my mother kept.
My work started with French 18th century soft-paste porcelain from the Sèvres factory. It is a funny material created on the cuttingedge of contemporary technology with the human hand, judgement and fired in a kiln – tools that are in use today. For over 30 years, thanks to knowing from Gordon how clays can be handled, I have been dealing in contemporary ceramics also. His teaching has embedded me with the knowledge to identify skills that I don’t have and to present them as a dealer to ever wider audiences.
Thank you Gordon.
Adrian Sassoon
1973, Monday morning at the Central School, first day at art college. We are in the hand-building room greeted by Gordon Baldwin, he smiles, looks at us through thickrimmed glasses. He talks about slabbing, making free form dishes. Poetry and music seems to be also part of the conversation, all infused with enthusiasm and energy. I relax, I know I will look forward to Mondays with Gordon.
2011 Feeling somewhat lost – a letter arrives from Gordon he tells me of coming across one of my pots in the Usher Gallery. He thought it had poetry! “To come across your pot was a happy moment – thanks for the pleasure.”
Agalis Manessi
My father has always been incredibly serious about being creative. As children we made trips to museums, art galleries and the theatre because he told us it was vital to feed the creative brain; never once did we think it strange our house was full of art and music, a pot of paint on the bookshelf and everywhere strange objects made out of clay.
On holiday in Wales he’d say “This year we’re going to collect stones with circles on, or round smooth ones, or pieces of driftwood.” He taught us to really examine the environment: to look at trees - not just the leaves but the shape, bark, texture and colours too. It was the same with clay: to explore what the material could do and to analyse and query not just the shape but the spaces around the shape. He described it to me once as not just making a pot but a making journey: that it is not necessarily important to find the end result but to travel along a path which could lead to somewhere else.
Amanda Clarke
I was an idle boy and, in order to escape formal games, I joined the art schools and Gordon. 18 months later I won the senior pottery prize. Unfortunately, only one small mug continues to exist.
30 some years later I became a Trustee and then Chair of Tate - opening Tate Modern with the Queen 25 years ago. After that I became Chair of Art Fund, then Chair of the Government Art Collection and subsequently Chair of the Friends of Leighton House. The interest that Gordon awakened in me never died and the creation of the Verey Gallery at Eton was at least in part a bow to him.
Sir David Verey
Arriving at school and not in a group, I soon found myself struggling to function. The house was run on fear from the top. Thankfully Richard Ehrman suggested the Drawing Schools as an alternative and I soon gulped down the mechanics of photography. Gordon’s method was to be brief, accurate and helpful. It worked and I realised his domain acted as a parallel universe where spotty young kids could recover from academic pressures and celebrate their own humanity. I could breathe and grow. Gordon gave me a future life and it has been an unending joy.
Jonathan Garratt left Eton with a firm conviction that there was a rewarding future life to be had in the cultural sector in Britain. Following a degree in archaeology from Cambridge University, he adopted a life as a potter, initially making garden pots and later pots for interiors and sculpture. Gordon’s encouragement in the ceramics section at school really became a firm basis from which to develop.
Jonathan Garratt
As a boy at Eton I already dreamt of being an artist. In the Drawing Schools I was excited by three-dimensional ideas and so was particularly inspired by the quiet but eyeopening teaching of Gordon Baldwin. Gordon considered seriously the aspirations of his young students and talked to us like adults. Encouraged by him, I decided to go to Art College.
At college I realised that my love of threedimensions should involve movement and I began to study Dance. I went on to choreograph for over sixty years and more recently Gordon came to the theatre where my company was performing and left a note at the stage door. He came each year enthusing wonderfully about what I was making and this did nothing but deepen my gratitude for the formative influence this very special man had on my life.
Sir Richard Alston
A
small step on a long walk
On a shelf in my living room is a box sculpture by Gordon from the early 1970s, impressed into the surface the phrase - “art usually shows an absurd resemblance to the aspect of something else,” a quote from the artist Jean Arp. It is a phrase that has travelled with me and epitomises Gordon’s particular ability to cause a reflection on the everyday object, the overlooked, the commonplace and how to translate that experience into a personal creative vision to be shared with others.
Robert Kesseler
I didn’t see it happening but when Gordon Baldwin arrived in the Art School in my second year at Eton, I was given permission to start thinking for myself through casting, coiling, moulding, throwing bits, and assembling. Then he got hold of some C15th stone being replaced in the school chapel and taught me to carve. Gordon encouraged me, as he had been, to think about the future, much to my mother’s displeasure. He took us to London to look at the work of William Turnbull and Brâncuși and talk. It has served me well so thank you, Gordon.
Robin Nicholson
I wondered if Richard Wentworth would want to orbit around the work but lightyears passed and it rested best unsaid like a pebble as tough as an ulcer. I’ve always liked Gordon’s way with limits and his well-honed trust in terse interiority, ranging big as the size of a small planet, an aperture to a better maker. His pots tend be as likeable as him.
A shadow is a vexed thing, like-by-like tarn-caro anglepoise-folk feed off-horizon for an island reached off an island off an island, something protective on the mind’s shore, gone by a headland off one of those seafaring cusps.
Light extrudes a storm vessel by unseasonal mirth from kiln-black solace. A Jacobin oar gets split on the toothrot of a pre-existing self, piercing some ribcage or other’s inkwell. Prodding along faithfully, his mind attends the bluff face of an ever-calming studio..
Al Braithwaite
Childhood is an over the shoulder word for something in an adult’s past. As children we are sent to school, and without knowing it, start performing as adults. ‘Up-bringing.’ In retrospect this is quite a dark comedy, peppered with little scintillas of light and consequence. I would have been fourteen years old when I first ‘noticed’ Gordon Baldwin. My memory is of somebody’s extraordinary focus, plain speaking energy with fearless practical intelligence.
The fact that this took place at the outer edges of a school’s estate might have contained a small sense of ‘escape.’ 65 years later, it’s a pleasure to realise that this was really a very significant cultural spot, populated by fellow pupils most of whose names I can recall, many of whom dispersed into the worlds of visual culture, practitioners as well as commentators. As the cliché goes, what I owe Gordon Baldwin is incalculable.
Richard Wentworth
I enjoyed working in the pottery rooms and made a big coil pot vase over many weeks of laborious crafting, carefully painting a design over it in cobalt blue. Mr Baldwin had just bought a spray gun to apply glazes and covered the whole pot in tin oxide. I was so upset, but the result was wonderful, as the cobalt reacted with the tin oxide producing an intriguing texture. I still have it - and now make pots full time.
Richard Pomeroy
In the late 1970s, when studying ceramics in a Fine Art School in South Africa, the sculptural approach taken by Gordon to the vessel form was hugely reassuring to me. His work provided, and still does, the confidence that the ceramic container or pot, so often considered an object of utilitarian function, can function like any other sculptural object - as a medium of personal and artistic expression.
Jonathan Keep
Beyond the Farrer Theatre, and the parade ground, on the very edge of school, Gordon Baldwin created a refuge for the aesthetically-inclined, to try their hand at ceramics. There was the broadest range of options. I envied those who took to throwing, a skill I have yet to master, but I found plenty of expressive outlets in coiling and slabbing, taking a leaf on that front from Gordon’s own book, building sometimes bizarre constructions, still with me and seemingly indestructible. Gordon fired everything with an impartial eye and conveying to me mysteriously that he saw worth in my clay creatures. On very special days he would offer his own trade mark glazes - for me, the off white with occasional flecks of colour being the most characteristic but also a
rich broken deep blue. Sealed away behind a flimsy white sheet he was busy with his own glorious constructions, the expression of something modern and mysterious and enlightening. In those hours spent under his tutelage, I sensed another set of values, mainly aesthetic but also to do with attitude to life, that was amusedly and constructively sceptical about the rigours and strictures set on an Eton boy’s life. There was a world outside, and Gordon, through his ceramic works as I later discovered, was and remains a renowned and preeminent part of it. What a great privilege it feels to wander round the Victoria and Albert Museum, see his creations and say - Gordon Baldwin taught me ceramics!
Tom Elliott
Coming from a two dimensional world with two painters as parents, Gordon opened my eyes to the three dimensional worldits excitement and its opportunities. With his intellectual observations and quiet enthusiasm, he encouraged me to see things from a new perspective. As I clanked into interviews at two leading architectural schools carrying a canvas sack of pottery made under his tutelage, the die was cast: a career in architecture. I thank Gordon for all that he has done for me - his teaching and his work has been an inspiration.
Spencer de Grey
In as much as a water diviner is able to reveal a hidden underground source of power and energy, so Gordon Baldwin possessed a mastery to discover and nurture the latent talents and skills of teenagers, often at a time in their lives when they were feeling severe ‘directional confusion.’ It was at a golden time of British art and design education when Gordon had his great influence, therefore it is no exaggeration to say that some very fine architects, designers, ceramicists and dancers owe their success to his unique way of teaching. His profound influence on many creative areas has far exceeded the world of clay and kilns.
Edward Hutchison
Collections Credits
The following organisations have given permission to use material and images in this book and we would like to thank them for their assistance.
Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Adrian Sassoon
Angus Graham-Campbell
Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery
Bob Catchpole
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
Brian Harding
Corvi-Mora, London
Crafts Council, London
Crispin Kelly
Diane and Marc Grainer
Ray Family
Alain Le Pichon’s Family
Erskine, Hall & Coe, London
Eton College, Windsor
Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge
Fondazione Officine Saffi, Milan
Frank Cohen
Glasgow Life Museums
Paul Greenhalgh
Museum August Kestner, Hanover
The Hepworth Wakefield
Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Lakeland Arts Collection, Cumbria
Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart
Leicester Museums and Galleries
MAAK Contemporary Ceramics, London
Matthew Rice
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art
The Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
National Museums Scotland
Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum, Trondheim
Nottingham City Museums and Galleries
Gallery Oldham
Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania
Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery
Keramiekmuseum Princessehof, Leeuwarden
Priscilla Bidwell
Robert Kesseler
Robin Nicholson
Sainsbury Centre, Norwich
Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead
Museum and Art Swindon
Usher Gallery, Lincoln
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
The Anthony Shaw Collection
York Museums Trust
Acknowledgements
Al Braithwaite
Alan Sekers
Adam Aaronson
Adrian Sassoon
Angus Graham-Campbell
Anthea Lawrence
Charles Milne
Crispin Kelly
David Dallas
Sir David Verey
Dominic Lowe
Dominic Ray
Edward Hutchison
Emmanuelle Lepic
Eton College
George Dodd
Henry Pomeroy
Jonathan Garratt
Jonathan Holliday
Justin Ray
Milan Ther
Sir Nicholas Coleridge
Officine Saffi
Priscilla Bidwell
Sir Richard Alston
Richard Ehrman
Richard Pomeroy
Richard Wentworth
Robert Kesseler
Robin Levien
Robin Nicholson
Spencer de Grey
Tommaso Corvi-Mora
Valerian Freyburg
Sir William Shawcross
Sir William Waldergrave
Image Credits
© Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries:
Striped Mountain, p 141.
Accepted in lieu of Inheritance Tax by HM Government and allocated to the Shipley Art Gallery, 2013. Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, Shipley Art Gallery: Painting in the Form of a Bowl with Piercing, Yellow and Blue Version, p 172.
Acquired through the generosity of Gerard and Sarah Griffin: Cup and Saucer, p 11; Cup, p12.
Bequeathed by Dr Anthony Ray, 2009: Jar, p 34.
Collection Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam / Photography: Tom Haartsen: Untitled (bottom middle), p 67; Broken Painting, p 74; Improvisation on a Dish, p 122; Anthropomorphic Vessel II, p 145; Spouted Vessel, p 149.
Collection Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Gift A.L. den Blaauwen / Photography: Tom Haartsen: Come, p 66.
Collection Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Gift Gordon Baldwin, 1986 / Photography: Tom Haartsen: Perched U-shaped Vessel, p 147.
Collection Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Gift Petra Verberne / Photography: Tom Haartsen: Vessel according to Klee VII, p 210.
Council Collection. Photo: Stokes Photo Ltd: Fontana Box, p 62; An Important Event from my Childhood, p 75; Painting in the Form of a Bowl, p 132.
Crafts Council Collection. Photo: John Hammond: Nightscape, p 66.
Gift from the collection of Richard Sykes and Penny Mason through the Contemporary Art Society, 2023: Flat Vessel with Signs, p 153.
Gift of Howard and Gwen Laurie Smits. Photo © Museum
Associates/LACMA: Round Vessel on Base, p 133.
Given by the Artist to the Victoria and Albert Museum: Venus Love Trap Vessel II, p 206; Vessel from a Quartet II, p 209.
Given in memory of Philip McGuinness: Vessel in the Form of an Ancient Sound I, p 217
© Gordon Baldwin OBE; Image © National Museums Scotland: Bowl (top middle), p 67; Sculpture (top middle), p 141.
Image courtesy of Adam Partridge Auctions: Monad, p 166.
Image courtesy of Chorley’s: Box for Jean Arp, p 72.
Image courtesy of Corvi-Mora, London: Five Seconds in The Rain, p 56; Winged Abstract Vessel, p 183; A Vessel Around a Square I, p 219; A Vessel Around a Square II, p 219; A Vessel Around a Square III, p 219;
Blue and Pierced Vessel II, p 241; Buds are Bursting Series I, II, III, p 240; Vessel for Pomona I (Black), p 243; Vessel for Pomona II, p 242; Vessel for a Sculptor I, II, III, IV, p 242; Vessels as Signals I, II, III, p 242.
Image courtesy of Gallery Oldham. From the Mary Edmonds
Bequest, through the Art Fund, 2004. Accession number 2005.17: Pot, p 130.
Image courtesy of Gallery Oldham. Purchased from auction in 2010 with funding from the HLF Collecting Cultures Fund. Accession number 2014.12: A Tall Vessel Form, p 40.
Image courtesy of MAAK: A Footed Pedestal, p 50; Cup Form, p 50; A Sculptural Vessel (bottom middle), p 80; A Sculptural Vessel (bottom right), p 80; Sculptural Vessel, p 83; Large Round Vessel from an Inscape, p 150.
Image courtesy of Sworders: Charger with pink and green linear decoration, p 79.
Image courtesy of Toovey’s: Number 15, The Architecture of a Legend, p13.
Image courtesy of Woolley and Wallis: Bowl Form, p 79; Vessel, p 92; Birds Flying, p 197.
Image courtesy of York Art Gallery: Black Dome Form, p 49.
Keramiekmuseum Princessehof, Leeuwarden; Bruikleen OttemaKingma Stichting: Image in the form of an upright irregular surface with notches, p 81; Image consisting of two upright surfaces with relief decoration, p 90.
Landesmuseum Württemberg, Bildarchiv: Vessel from an Inscape, p 158.
Landesmuseum Württemberg, P. Frankenstein / H. Zwietasch: Shell Sculpture, p 117; Flat Vessel, p 144.
© Michael Harvey. Courtesy of Oxford Ceramics Gallery: Circular Piece with Wave, p 47; Vessel, p 171; Large Bowl Form, p 173; Cloudscape, p 182.
Museum August Kestner, Hannover. Photographer: Detlef Jürges: Large Blue, p 158.
Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State, Museum purchase, 78.149: Bowl, p 95.
Photo: Benedict Ray, 2024: Second Pink Poem Box, p 62; Small Bowl, p 67; Painting in the Form of a Bowl, p 71; Mozart, p 71; Small Flat Dish, p 71.
Photo: Evie Milsom: Figure (top middle), p 13; Head, p 15; The Watcher, p 27; Torso, p 27; Untitled (bottom right), p 45; A Pedestal
Bowl, p 50; Untitled (bottom middle), p 50; A Pedestal Bowl, p 50; Bowl with Apples, p 80; Vessel, p 72; Bowl, p 72; Arch Series Number 5, p 95; A Conical Vessel with Fin, p 99; Vessel, p 121; Wedge Work, p 129; An Irregular Form, p 129; Tall Vessel, p 138; Large Vessel, p 137; Argos, p 138; Large Flattened Vessel, p 147; Large Sculptural Leaning Form, p 147; Monad, p 151; Vessel from an Inscape, p 152; Vessel from an Inscape, p 151; Longspout, p 151; White Vessel with Signs, p 159; Cloud I, p 158; Tall Vessel, p 162; Sculpture in Two Parts (bottom right), p 163; Vessel from an Inscape, p 166; Enclosed form with Fin and Cross, p 172; Pierced Vessel, p 174; A Domed Form, p 177; Enclosed Flattened Vessel, p 183; Dark Vessel, p 198; Leaning Vessel, p 203; Rocking Vessel (Ocean Geometry IV), p 201; Vessel for Isis II, p 206; Vessel According to Klee VI Second Dancer in Yellow, p 206; Alembic VI, p 202; Untitled (decorated by Nancy Baldwin), p 207; Column II, p 210; Untitled (decorated by Nancy Baldwin) (top middle), p 216; Untitled (decorated by Nancy Baldwin) (top right), p 216; Untitled (decorated by Nancy Baldwin) (bottom left), p 216; Untitled (decorated by Nancy Baldwin) (bottom middle), p 216; Open to the Sky II, p 221; Untitled (decorated by Nancy Baldwin) (top left), p 219; Untitled (decorated by Nancy Baldwin), p 238; White Vessel Study III, p 238; Paloma Series I, II, III, p 243.
Photo: Freia Beer/ Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum: Sculpture (top left), p 141.
© Photo: Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge: Fragment of painting in form of a dish, p 72; Abstract Ceramic, p 102.
Photograph by Philip Sayer. © The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust: all works from The Anthony Shaw Collection / York Museums Trust.
Photograph by Philip Sayer. © York Museums Trust: Painting in the Form of a Dish, p 90; Vessel According to Klee XI, p 201; Vessel for Dark Air, p 207; Kaspar’s Goblet, p 243.
Presented by Henry Rothschild, 2006: Bulbous Sculpted Form, p 170.
Presented by West Midlands Arts: Extended Bowl (bottom middle), p 121; Extended Bowl (bottom right), p 121.
Presented in memory J. W. Roberts, 2015: Large Bowl, p 102.
Purchased in memory of Annabel Freyberg through the generosity of her friends: Figure (bottom middle), p 13.
Purchased with the assistance of the Crafts Board of the Australia Council, 1981. Photo: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne: Bowl Form, p 98.
Purchased with the assistance of the Friends of Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery and the National Art Collections Fund, 1997: White Bowl with Cross and Slits, p 178.
Reproduced by courtesy of Lakeland Arts Trust: The Watcher, p 33.
Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College: All Wall Crosses, p 16-17; Untitled (bottom left), p 25; Untitled (bottom left), p 31; Developed Bottle, p 116; Dish (Untitled), p 144; Untitled, p 173; Untitled, p 174; A Dancer with Strange Companions, p 219.
Sainsbury Centre, UEA. Photo: Denisa Ilie: Reach for the Eye I, p 122. Sainsbury Centre, UEA. Photo: Pete Huggins: Maquette, p 45; Bowl (top left), p 102; Bowl (top middle), p 102; Bowl (bottom left), p 102; Bowl (bottom right), p 102; Bowl, p 132; Bowl, p 141; Bowl, p 144; Painting in the Form of a Bowl, p 148; Bowl, p 159.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Adrian Sassoon, Esq., 1998. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Axe Vessel, p 140.
The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC, United States. Gift of Diane and Marc Grainer. Photo: Lee B. Ewing: Vessel, p 147; Flat Form with Grid, p 177.
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection. Photo: MMFA: White Pierced Bowl, p 176.
© The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge: Flat Vessel, p 177; Round Vessel, p 178; Hollow Form, p 206.
Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, Shipley Art Gallery: Thrown Agateware bowl on tall hollow base, p 44; Vertical slab-built form, p 81; Free-form dish, p 81; Large rectangular shallow platter, p 129; Dyad II, p 142.
Wakefield Council Permanent Art Collection (The Hepworth Wakefield). Presented by Tim Sayer with Art Fund support, 2017. Photo: Jerry Hardman-Jones: Blue Vessel, p 123.
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London/Gordon Baldwin: Cup and Saucer, p 11; Cup, p 12; Figure (bottom middle); Torso pot, p 32; Seascape, p 33; Reptilian Black, p33; Larger porcelain bowl on base about painting and sculpture, p 66; Fragments of painting in the form of a dish, p 90; Extended dish: Seferis Series No. 1, p 117; Avis II, p 133; Large Round Vessel from an Inscape, p 148; Dark Rocking Piece, p 168; Venus Love Trap Vessel II, p 206; Vessel from a Quartet II, p 209; A Vessel Looking for a Place to Be (Page of V&A 150th anniversary album), p 216; Vessel in the Form of an Ancient Sound I, p 217.
This book is published to celebrate the life and work of Gordon Baldwin and accompanies the exhibition
Gordon Baldwin–Inscape
May 24, 2025 – August 10, 2025
Kunstverein in Hamburg
Kunstverein in Hamburg
Director: Milan Ther
Assistant Curator: Dr. Martin Karcher
Exhibition Management: Linda Epp
Communication and Publications: Christian Bätjer
Communication and Press: Francisca Markus
Head of Finances: Jörg Joswiak
Technical Manager: Robert Görß
Head of Supporting Members: Julia Heukelbach
Member and Visitor Services: Sarah Plochl
Visitor Services: Mette Bjørndal Velling, Emma Bombail, Max Fascher
Board
Prof. Dr. Christoph H. Seibt (Chair), Dr. Larissa Falckenberg (Co-Chair), Ralph Tübben (Treasurer), Simone Curaj, Yasmina Grau, Max Prediger, András Siebold, Dirk Stewen, Dr. Rüdiger Zeller
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Gordon Baldwin, Edward Hutchison, Tommaso Corvi-Mora, Crispin Kelly London, the members of the Kunstverein, Behörde für Kultur und Medien, and Hapag-Lloyd Foundation.
Kunstverein in Hamburg
Klosterwall 23
20095 Hamburg Germany
www.kunstverein.de
Technical note:
The distinction in Gordon Baldwin’s work between earthenware and stoneware is an ambiguous one: most of the work was decorated and fired multiple times, to add depth and resonance to the surfaces. Through repeated firing, the density of the material increased, making it more compact and closer to stoneware than earthenware. The firings usually were at 1100°C. Gordon Baldwin has no interest in materials as signifiers: the technique used is always subordinate to formal and conceptual considerations.
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders of material reproduced in this book. We would be pleased to rectify any omissions in subsequent editions should they be drawn to the publishers’ attention.
Published jointly by Edward Hutchison, 8 Cleaver Square, London SE11 4DW and Kunstverein in Hamburg, Klosterwall 23, 20095 Hamburg © Edward Hutchison and Kunstverein in Hamburg 2025 Images © the image owners as shown in picture credits Essays and texts © the authors
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the permission from the publishers.
ISBN 978-1-0369-0649-8
Book Design: Susan Scott and Steve Hayes
Printing: Neville Rolt, Blackmore Ltd., Shaftesbury, Dorset SP7 8PX
Binding: Skyline Bookbinders Ltd
Editor and Picture Researcher: Natalie Baerselman le Gros
Authors: Natalie Baerselman le Gros (chapter introductions), Anthony Gardner and Helen Walsh
Proof reading: Al Braithwaite
Text printed lithographically using Komori GL540 press on Arctic Matt paper 150 gsm
