Gripping

Serendipity, eh? Had I not been visiting the Arnolfini in Bristol to take in Polly Braden's photography exhibition Beside The Sea recently, I would have missed Jonathan Baldock's Held.

In some ways, being surrounded by Baldock's brightly coloured tapestries and sculptures was like a drug trip and reminiscent of films such as The Wicker Man and The Holy Mountain in terms of their slightly surrealist take on folklore and pagan ritual. But the artworks were neither intimidating nor sinister - on the contrary, they emphasised connection and communality. The exhibition's centrepiece was a huge fabric bear that visitors were positively encouraged to embrace, or be embraced by.

On the one hand, Held was a fresh take on our own native folk traditions and imagery. On the other, the many depictions of flora and fauna (including the human figure or body parts) transforming into one another drew attention to interconnections in the natural world and our place within it in a way that reminded me of a couple of exhibitions of Indigenous Latin American art I've seen recently (Julia Isidrez's Mud Is Everything at Nottingham Contemporary and Gold And The Universe at the MARQ in Alicante).

And, at the risk of allowing my own current preoccupations to encourage me to read too much into things, I saw the sculptures with hands, feet, faces and tongues protruding - mischievous rather than grotesque - as a commentary on the fundamentally human aspect of the creative act, in the face of AI. The ceramics seemed to underline the fact that artists put themselves into their work, and that that work is a physical embodiment of their labours. Bypassing this process through generative AI utterly misses the point.