Jonathan Baldock's 'Held' at Arnolfini: Folkloric Psychedelia and Pagan Menace

Jonathan Baldock's exhibition 'Held' at Arnolfini in Bristol presents a tense world of folkloric psychedelia and pagan aesthetics. The show features tapestries and ceramics that are weird, threatening, and utterly compelling. Visitors encounter lifesize felt figures, ceramic flowers with noses and ears, and hands reaching out of pots. A giant bear on a platform emits a pungent odor of fur and wood, with a deep bass rumble. The exhibition explores the tension between care and violence, love and rejection, reflecting Baldock's attempt to make sense of an England he is genetically from but culturally and sexually cannot fully belong to. References to his mother, English history, Japanese culture, and sexuality are woven throughout. The ambient soundtrack adds to the unsettling atmosphere, evoking ancient rites through a lens of 1960s hippy love and millennial malaise.