BRISTOL.- One of the most distinctive artists working in the UK today, Jonathan Baldock creates tactile installations that draw on craft traditions, personal history and our deep connection to nature. Held marks a significant moment in his two-decade career, coinciding with the growing critical recognition of his work across the UK and Europe.

Spanning ceramics, textiles and sculpture, the exhibition unfolds as a vivid, sensory feast. Rooted in a lifelong connection to the natural world, Baldock’s practice is shaped by inherited skills — sewing, model-making and working with the hands — passed down by his mother and grandmother and rooted in the histories of working-class people.

At the exhibition’s centre sits a monumental bear sculpture, newly commissioned by Arnolfini. Titled Bear Hug, it invites visitors into a direct physical encounter — not to be held, but to hold us. The sculpture shifts between comfort and power, drawing on the bear’s layered cultural meanings, from ancient deity to modern-day teddy bear. Over the course of the exhibition, its surface will carry the marks of repeated embraces. Its face, modelled on a 3D scan of the artist’s mother, anchors the work in a gesture of care and intimacy.

Across the galleries, Baldock extends this language through a series of sculptural forms. Aether — a work formed from beeswax, ceramic and glass — hovers overhead, evoking mythic ideas of a space between worlds. Textile works and wall hangings reflect on our relationship to nature, while The Caretakers — a pair of hung costumes at the exhibition entrance — welcome visitors into the space. Passing these “queer guardians and sentinels”, a series of ceramic and wall-based textile sculptures based on garden flowers feature faces protruding from petals, with trailing roots and body parts often cast from the artist’s mother.





Baldock creates a cultivated wilderness, blurring boundaries between the human and the natural. Elsewhere, myth and folklore surface in shapeshifting ceramic creatures inspired by the fifteenth-century misericords, wooden figures and gargoyles.

Sound by Luke Barton and scent by Lora Hemy permeate the space, heightening the exhibition’s immersive and intimate atmosphere.

In an age increasingly defined by loneliness, accelerated by the rise of AI and a gradual loss of communal spaces, Held proposes physical closeness as a radical and necessary gesture. The Arnolfini galleries are transformed into an environment of comfort and care in which we can slow down and feel our way back to nature, and each other.

“I was thinking about the significance of human connection and the important role that a place like Arnolfini can play as a public space: a place of gathering, a place of collective community, open to everyone.”

— Jonathan Baldock

Publication: Jonathan Baldock, Held

Published to coincide with his Arnolfini exhibition, this is the first monograph dedicated to Jonathan Baldock’s work, bringing together the new commission alongside a wider overview of his practice to date.

Featuring newly commissioned texts, the book explores key themes in Baldock’s work, including world-building, making, nature and nurture, and the body. Contributors include Gemma Brace, Head of Exhibitions at Arnolfini, writer and curator Glenn Adamson, curator at Yorkshire Sculpture Park Sarah Coulson and artist and Professor Dominic Johnson.