Jonathan Baldock's Held: A Wilderness Built by Hand
The scent reaches you before the artwork does. A custom fragrance by Lora Hemy hangs in the Arnolfini's galleries this summer, and beneath it runs a score by Luke Barton, low and rustling, like something moving through hedgerow. By the time you've registered a single object, Jonathan Baldock has already got you: disoriented, alert, ready to be led somewhere unfamiliar. This is not so much an exhibition as a transformation, the whole building turned over to a colourful, immersive wilderness where nature and folklore grow through every gallery.
Jonathan Baldock, The Caretakers, 2021. Textile, rubber, foam and wood. Installation view: Material Worlds at Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry, UK, 2024. Copyright Jonathan Baldock. Courtesy of the artist and Hayward Gallery Touring. Photo by Luke Pickering.
That somewhere begins with thread. The Caretakers, two ceremonial costumes stationed at the entrance, are dense with hand-stitched plant motifs, appliquéd leaves and tendrils climbing the fabric as if they'd rooted there overnight. Textile sentries, granting passage into whatever waits beyond.
Jonathan Baldock 'Held' 2026 (Installation View) at Arnolfini. Courtesy of the artist and Arnolfini. Photography by Dan Weill.
What waits is a bear. Enormous, newly commissioned, planted at the centre of the show and built, in part, to be embroidered by touch itself. Baldock trained in ceramics and sculpture, but his real inheritance is textile: sewing and modelling passed down from his mother and grandmother, hands teaching hands. That lineage is stitched into the bear's construction, and its face carries a 3D scan of his mother's features, so the fabric of the sculpture becomes a kind of cloth memory. Across the run of the exhibition its surface will darken, fray gently and soften under thousands of embraces, until by September it wears the visible weave of a whole summer's contact.
Jonathan Baldock, Nature to be commanded must be obeyed, 2019. Hessian, felt, silk thread, polymer, semi-precious stone. Copyright Jonathan Baldock. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Stephen White & Co.
Elsewhere, the textile work turns wilder still. Wall-based hangings depict flowers with faces pressing through their petals, roots trailing in stitched thread beneath them, hemlines fraying into something closer to root systems than fabric edges. Baldock calls these figures queer guardians, and their felted, embroidered surfaces share a strange kinship with the shapeshifting ceramic creatures nearby, drawn from fifteenth-century misericords and gargoyles, medieval carvings that once lurked beneath choir stalls. Overhead, Aether hovers in beeswax, ceramic and glass, catching the light the way silk catches a draught.
A new monograph accompanies the show, the first dedicated solely to Baldock's work, gathering essays from curators and writers alongside images of the commission, a way to carry a fragment of the exhibition home.
Jonathan Baldock 'Held' 2026 (Installation View) at Arnolfini. Courtesy of the artist and Arnolfini. Photography by Dan Weill.
For Baldock, the project was never only about the objects. "I was thinking about the significance of human connection," he has said, "and the important role that a place like Arnolfini can play as a public space." Held answers in cloth and stitch rather than argument. It asks you to touch something, to notice the weight of thread and hand-work in a room built from folklore and care, and to leave carrying the sense of having brushed against something entirely unforgettable.
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Further Information:
Jonathan Baldock: Held runs at Arnolfini, Bristol, until 27 September 2026.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Jonathan Baldock, Moment in the sun (detail), 2023. Felt, hessian, polymer, turquoise and quartz. Copyright Jonathan Baldock. Courtesy of the artist.
All further images as credited in captions.