Jonathan Baldock’s Held at Arnolfini, Bristol, builds an immersive environment of ceramics, textiles and sound where care and threat coexist. Folkloric imagery and bodily forms create an intimate, unstable space, drawing viewers into a shifting encounter that is physical and psychological, constantly in tension.
The Arnolfini galleries are transformed into a sensory wilderness inspired by folklore and the natural world. Sculpture, textile and sound turn the space into something between garden, ritual site and psychological landscape. Works such as Aether and The Caretakers establish an atmosphere built around presence, touch and heightened perception.
At the entrance, life-sized felt figures act as ceremonial thresholds. Their plant-covered garments and ambiguous bodily markings suggest both protection and exposure. This opening gesture sets up the exhibition’s core tension, where care is never fully separated from unease.
That tension intensifies across the galleries. Ceramic flowers sprout facial features, while tongues and limbs emerge from organic forms. Hands extend from vessels on the floor, suggesting containment, rupture and the possibility of escape. The space feels animated, as if the objects are quietly responsive to the viewer’s presence.
Sound and scent deepen the immersion. A layered audio environment and a custom olfactory element shift perception away from the purely visual, reinforcing the sense that the space is inhabited rather than displayed. The result is a field of heightened sensory pressure that never fully settles.
At the centre stands a monumental bear sculpture titled Held. It invites direct physical interaction, encouraging visitors to climb, sit and embrace it. The gesture is disarming, but not stable. The encounter oscillates between comfort and risk, as if the work might hold the viewer or resist them entirely. Over time, its surface accumulates traces of contact, embedding collective experience into its form. Its face, derived from a scan of the artist’s mother, adds a private psychological layer to an otherwise public object.
Across the installation, Baldock draws on folklore, pagan aesthetics and craft traditions to construct a world that resists straightforward interpretation. References to queerness, working-class identity and personal history are present, but they are not presented as resolution or narrative clarity. Instead, they surface as fragmented pressures within a broader emotional and material field.
The work also reflects on contemporary conditions of isolation and fractured social bonds. In an environment shaped by technological acceleration and diminished communal space, Held positions physical proximity as both desire and risk. It asks what it means to be held, and what it costs to accept or refuse that gesture.
Materially, the exhibition relies on ceramics, textiles, felt and hand-built forms shaped through sewing, modelling and weaving. These processes are not decorative additions but structural tools that give the work its psychological charge. Craft becomes a language of instability, where fragility and tactility carry equal weight.
Held sustains contradiction without release. Comfort and violence occupy the same gesture, held in deliberate tension. The work leaves no stable ground, only shifting proximity where touch is never neutral and every invitation carries consequence.
