Gordon Baldwin obituary

The Guardian

09-06-2025

Gordon Baldwin was probably happiest with the term 'sculptural potter' to describe himself. He disliked most definitions because they did not adequately encompass his art, one that explored broadly and complexly the potential of the 'vessel'. He investigated this in lyrical big bowls and striking articulated and enclosed pieces, using the premise of containment to gauge ideas about painting and drawing on new types of form.
Baldwin, who has died aged 92, was a modernist in ceramics, but he never eschewed his traditional roots because they enabled him to evolve a highly original language. It led to some of the most convincing and liberated clay sculpture since the second world war.
Even though Baldwin made functional work in the early 1950s, the enigmatic objects he produced from the middle of that decade were less influenced by other ceramics, and more by art from early civilisations, and notably 20th-century abstraction.
His mature pieces were 'diaries of thought', with poetic titles that often referred to particular artists, literature or music that absorbed him. Visually, figures like Arp, Klee and Brancusi remained significant, prompting fresh responses to these returning obsessions.
It was a sign of his endless invention that, often making in series, he remained ahead of the game, even as grand old man.
Baldwin used the vessel as a metaphor for imaginary terrains and travel, enjoying the questions it might hold, especially where his sculptures were virtually sealed off but for one small aperture or opening. This fascination with the inner nature of an object or idea was defined by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins as 'inscape', a phrase he loved.
His important locations were often those on borders, where the land transforms, perhaps watery places, such as the untamed rocky beach at Porth Neigwl, on the Llŷn peninsula in north Wales, which he christened 'the place of stones'. Or the Normandy coast that Proust knew, another important writer for Baldwin, one who produced his own diaries of thought.
This was not surprising for a man brought up in a sea-edged county, Lincolnshire, and as a youth he made a memorable cycle trip from his birth-city of Lincoln to the coast, surely an environment that gave him an early awareness of light, texture and changing atmosphere that would imbue the spirit of his ceramics.
He was the only child of Lewis Baldwin, an engineer, and Elsie (nee Hilton). He attended Lincoln school, followed by Lincoln School of Art to study painting, and where he was introduced to pottery by Robert Blatherwick. There Baldwin met Nancy Chandler, a fellow student and his future wife, who became a fine painter herself, and a crucial partner and catalyst.
In 1951 both enrolled to study ceramics at the Central School of Art in London, then still surrounded by bomb damage. They were excited by a progressive department run by Dora Billington because it was interdisciplinary and experimental.
In addition to pottery tutors, artists such as William Turnbull and Eduardo Paolozzi were brought in, instilling a lively connection between different media and ideas. Billington encouraged hand-building and earthenware, Baldwin's tools in the years ahead, supplemented by occasional making at the wheel, and stoneware.
Graduating in 1953, he began an influential teaching career, firstly at Goldsmiths College, London, and then concurrently back at the Central School, from 1956. This followed a break for army national service at Oswestry, Shropshire.
Baldwin's output in the late 50s to early 60s included anthropomorphic bottle shapes and more overtly figurative pieces or 'watchers'. They suggested influences from Ancient Egypt, early Greece and Oceania, but also artists such as Picasso and Henry Moore. The work was surreal and ominous, akin to other British sculpture produced in the still-anxious aftermath of a world war, art described by the critic Herbert Read as expressing a 'geometry of fear'.
From 1957 Baldwin also taught pottery and sculpture at Eton college, and a year later he and Nancy were married. Dividing his time at Eton with increasing art college commitments, he remained there for almost 40 years, where his approach was characterised by an inspiring sense of inclusiveness and encouragement.
Those pupils who felt academically lost found civilisation instead in its drawing schools. Baldwin, who initially must have cut a somewhat avant-garde figure, had an airy first-floor studio there, but he often worked alongside his students, epitomising the power of teaching by example.
By the mid-60s he had moved to a palette of metallic matts and mirror blacks on more abstract works, influenced by creative chance and musical improvisation. They had thrown, cut and reassembled elements and possessed a hieratic, ritualistic quality. Some were, he said, 'about the darkness of space inside things'. In 1970 Baldwin began parallel activity in white slip, a clear canvas for painting and colour on objects resembling strange miniature landscapes.
From 1979, influenced by Umberto Boccioni's Development of a Bottle in Space, he was freeing up his modelling and marking on dramatic 'developed' bowl and bottle shapes with wing-like extensions. The 80s also saw a remarkable string of monolith forms. There was a confidence about the totemic, dream-like groups of sculpture in his ethereal show Mysterious Volumes at the Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam in 1989, capping his international reputation.
No longer teaching by 1996, Baldwin was now based in Market Drayton in Shropshire, close to his beloved Wales. From the mid-80s he sometimes used vivid blues and yellows on his surfaces, but he still liked the nuances of monochromes, and the late work seen at Marsden Woo gallery in London was generally more understated and condensed. The 2012 retrospective toured by York Art Gallery revealed the extent of his activity on paper, drawings and collages which enriched his three-dimensional concerns.
Baldwin's eyesight seriously declined after the York show, forcing him to give up clay, but he allayed his frustration with a flurry of playful and spontaneous charcoal drawings which showed that his mind's eye, in many ways so aural too, had not dimmed.
Honours came his way, including being appointed OBE in 1992, and a doctorate from the Royal College of Art eight years later, but it was the early morning visits to the studio that really counted, those moments of journey and discovery which had to be shared.
An exhibition marking his achievement is now showing at the Kunstverein in Hamburg until August.
Nancy predeceased him in 2021. He is survived by his children, Raef, Amanda and Flavia, his grandchildren, Raman, Jago, Freya, Fleur, Harry and Imogen, and great-grandchildren, Otterlie and Theo.
Gordon Baldwin, potter and sculptor, born 10 July 1932; died 18 May 2025