Jonathan Baldock's 'Held' is a menacing pagan ritual
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- Jonathan Baldock's exhibition 'Held' is showing at Bristol's Arnolfini, featuring tapestries and ceramics in a folkloric pagan aesthetic
- The Arnolfini installation includes two lifesize felt figures in leaf-decorated robes, ceramic flowers sprouting noses and tongues, hands reaching from floor pots, and a giant bear on a platform visitors are invited to climb
- The work explores the tension between care and violence, drawing on Baldock's English ancestry and a sense of cultural and sexual alienation from the tradition he genetically comes from
- Personal references to Baldock's mother and her English garden recur throughout, alongside nods to English history, Japanese culture and sexuality
- Wall texts use 'therapy-lite language' about 'radical gestures' and 'queer and working-class stories' that the reviewer says fails to match the show's menacing, visceral quality
- An ambient soundtrack of fur, damp moss and a deep bass rumble creates a forest atmosphere the reviewer compares to The Wicker Man relocated to early-2000s semi-rural Kent
Why it matters: For visitors to Arnolfini, the show rejects its own comfortable therapeutic framing — the pagan imagery, bear sculpture and ceremonial robes create a hostile, ritualistic space confronting tribal belonging, identity and violence rather than offering reassurance. Baldock emerges here as a significant English artist working at the intersection of queerness, class and folk tradition.
