Jonathan Baldock. Grave Goods.

Vessels with hands and feet

In spring 2022, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York showed Grave Goods by the British artist Jonathan Baldock. The exhibition ran from 3 March to 2 April.

At the centre were nine glazed stoneware vessels. Their colours were not the muted tones we expect of mourning: deep crimson, cobalt blue, bright patches of glaze. Out of their bodies came ceramic body parts. A foot. Some fingers. An ear. A tongue.

These parts were cast from Baldock's own body. The fingers are his fingers, the foot his foot. The artist left part of his shape on vessels made for death.

One, called Unfurl, is dark red, its body creased and curled like a squashed internal organ. Another, Boo-Boo, carries a cobalt blue foot. The names sound like children's jokes. That is how Baldock works: heavy matters in a light voice, sometimes with a dark humour.

Herbs inside

Inside the vessels were herbs. Rosemary, lavender, wormwood, mugwort, lemon balm, yarrow. Plants long tied, in many parts of Europe, to funerals and to caring for the dead. They were laid in coffins and on graves, for remembering and for farewell.

Visitors were invited to lean in and bring their noses to the rim. No sign asked them to keep back. To know the work, you had to come as close as you would to a person.

A late visitor would notice something. The writer for The Brooklyn Rail came weeks after the opening and found the smell mostly gone. The dried herbs were still there, but they said little.

One could call that a flaw in the display. One could also call it the truest part of the work. An exhibition about death whose smell also died along the exhibition calendar. Early visitors smelled more. Late ones saw only objects.

Reliquaries and hangings

On the walls were smaller pieces Baldock called reliquaries. On coarse hessian sat flattened ceramic faces, feet, fingers. In a European church, a reliquary keeps a fragment of a saint's bone or hair. Here, what is kept is the shape of the artist's own body, while he is alive.

Two large hangings, Seasons in the Sun and In Your Face, were stitched by hand from candy coloured felt and hessian. They recall early Renaissance painting: fields of tiny millefleur flowers, compositions like friezes or altarpieces. Mouthless heads and ceramic hands push out from the flat cloth.

The Brooklyn Rail review found traces of northern European folklore, Bauhaus theatre and 1970s pop in the show. The sources are far apart, yet the room held together through the same care of making and the same slightly dark smile.

What goes with the dead

Grave goods are objects buried with the dead. From ancient Egypt to Bronze Age barrows, people placed jars, bowls, jewellery and food in tombs for the last journey. Archaeology reads past lives largely through such things.

Baldock borrows the name and turns it around. His vessels are not underground. They stand in a gallery, under lights, among the living. And what they carry is not gold but a few handfuls of fragrant dried grass.

Smell brings death close. Looking at a vessel, one can stay at a distance. Smelling it, one must bend, breathe in, and let part of the object enter the body. It is an intimate gesture, close to a farewell.

Then the smell fades. The vessel remains, the clay foot remains, but the most living part of the work has left first. Baldock does not explain this. The room says it. Other artists have gone looking for the smell of death, like Eric Fong with Thanatos, but few let that smell die in front of the visitor.