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Gordon Baldwin in Context

The work of Gordon Baldwin (b.1931) was shown in a retrospective exhibition at York Art Gallery in early 2012. Baldwin’s career as an artist has straddled the disciplines of ceramics and sculpture and the exhibition and accompanying book provides the first opportunity to assess his lifetime’s work. Jones was invited to contribute a chapter to the book, focussing on the visual arts context during the five decades in which Baldwin’s work was produced and received.

A central problem in attempting to contextualise Baldwin’s achievements as an artist working in the medium of ceramics is that of categorisation. Alison Britton’s comment on Baldwin’s work in 1993 - ‘I don’t mind any longer if we call them pots, vessels, things or sculptures’ – is an attractive one but leaves a major problem of interpretation in that Baldwin’s ambitions to work across such categories was confounded by institutional and disciplinary factors and by the prevailing art criticism of the 1950s and early 1960s, the crucial period of Baldwin’s formative career.

In recent years writers such as Rosalind Krauss and David Hulks have talked of a ‘post-medium condition’, in which historical categorisations on the basis of materials used by artists and the named disciplines in which they work are interrogated and challenged. This chapter identifies Baldwin’s work as an early example of the kind of hybridity that can now be recognised and celebrated. Jones’ work expands current research relating to the relationships between ceramics and sculpture by applying the idea of the ‘post-medium condition’ to a specific historical context which had previously been unexplored. Research for this chapter engaged with all the available literature and the depth of analysis and interpretation of the material has resulted in a text that significantly advances knowledge in the subject.