Nancy Baldwin and Gordon Baldwin

About

This exhibition is the first showing of the results of an exciting collaboration between the husband and wife team of potter and sculptor Gordon Baldwin and painter Nancy Baldwin. After decades of work, they recently embarked on a new phase of their creative partnership. In the wake of some inspiring discussions Gordon built a series of vessel forms ' three-dimensional canvasses ' which were then further animated and decorated through Nancy's mark-making ' modelling, carving, and painting with glaze. The resulting series truly combines the creative strengths of both.

For Nancy and Gordon these new vessels represent a new venture in their personal creative development. Though Nancy has pursued a career as a painter, like Gordon, she originally studied Pottery at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, where she specialised in hand building rather than throwing. For Nancy this was an unparalleled and
enthusiastically embraced opportunity to work freely and intuitively directly on the raw clay surface, exploring treatments for portraying the nude on three-dimensional form, a point where vessels and figures seem to converge and become part of a seamless broader whole.

As Emmanuel Cooper remarks in his essay 'Because Nancy Baldwin is a painter rather than a potter, and Gordon Baldwin a sculptor more than a potter, the resulting collaboration is a fascinating hybrid of art and craft with both elements required in equal measure. For Nancy the
vessel is not merely an oddly shaped canvas but a three dimensional form around which the figures must flow and reside.'