by Gordon Baldwin, who died at the age of 93, was one of the calmest revolutionary ceramic artists in Great Britain. As a leading figure of his generation, he created sculptural vessels that were more informed by painting and poetry than by traditional ideas of functional craft.
Baldwin was part of a post-war generation of potter, which emerged from the long shadow of Bernard Leach, the so-called father of the British studio potash. He opposed the rustic orientalism of this school and instead developed an idiosyncratic sculptural approach that developed in his career for seven decades. Where some of his colleagues tasks the vascular form for a “pure” sculpture, Baldwin sculpture and pot one. He described the ship as a creative framework and compared it with the “structure of a haiku”.
Although Baldwin was an experienced thrower, he avoided the ceramic wheel and instead decided to build coils. He adorned matt with picturesque abstract markings in black and gray tones or with washes or splashes deep color. Some are consistently pigmented, such as Your titles are often alluding, come from poems, music, works of art or places. Others are simply with the title “Simply”; He called several works that paint painting in the form of a bowl. For Baldwin, whose first love was a teenager, it was deeply poetry, not a ceramic.
Baldwin’s ships often remember rocks or landscapes. He often visited an admission to North Wales, he called “the place of the stones” and said: “Stones have special silence. Sometimes my vessels have special silence.” All of his works share a quality of the inside and reflect what Baldwin described as “inscape”, and borrowed the term from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, which used it to describe the essence that is unique for a person or an object.
Baldwin was also a lifelong educator. He began teaching in 1955 and taught institutions such as the Goldsmiths College, the Central School of Arts and Crafts and the Camberwell College in London as well as the Bath Academy of Art and the Loughborough College. But his most important teaching role was not at an art school, but at the eton college.
For 39 years, from 1957, he taught part -time in a pottery studio that offered a sanctuary for young etonians. A former student, the artist Edward Hutchison, remembered how Baldwin “discovered and promoted teenagers’ latent talents and skills”.
He kept his own artistic practice and used the school’s large stove to relieve his own work next to that of his students. A visitor in the 1980s in the Baldwins house in the nearby Willowbrook described his “larger than life” ceramic sculptures, which recorded its lawn, “like huge chess pieces”.
Gordon Nelson Baldwin was born on July 10, 1932 as the son of Lewis Nelson Baldwin, an engineer, and Elsie, born Hilton, in Lincoln. When an art teacher gave the boy a book about Paul Klee, it made a big impression and he decided to become a painter.
For this purpose, he wrote down at the Lincoln School of Art, but came across the world of ceramics on another course: Picasso’s ceramics revealed the opportunities to combine sound with a picturesque approach. He met his future wife Nancy, a painter, and moved to London in 1950, where a revolution on the Central School awaited him.
Here the proto-pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi and the sculptor William Turnbull taught a generation of students who would claim ceramics as a sculptural medium. There was no distinction between art and craft that marked a radical break with the past.
Baldwin remembered Paolozzi, “without two pennies about ceramic quality and feeling for sound”, but only “bend of sound and glaze”. Baldwin’s own mature work is effortlessly qualified and yet loose is often the quality of a charcoal sketch.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Baldwin made functional ceramics (including plates, jugs and bottles) as well as half-abstract figures in ceramic, wood or cast metal. From the 1970s, his focus was on the ship. This was done in countless shapes: shells that were raised on ST and on the base or with jagged, apparently torn edges or, for example, with a single extended angle. His preference was for “forms that have a certain unpleasant response”.
He was appointed an OBE in 1992 and received an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art in London in 2000. In 2008, the Ruthin Craft Center made the exhibition Nancy & Gordon Baldwin, which contained ships shaped by Gordon and was encouraged by Nancy’s figurative paintings that were cut and glazed into the sound.
The most important solo exhibition Gordon Baldwin: The objects for a landscape were organized by the York Art Gallery in 2012. The exhibition was the 80th birthday and the permanent loan of Anthony Shaw’s collection of craft into the gallery of Baldwin’s largest single owner group. He continued in the 2010s from his home studio in Shropshire.
Baldwin’s works are held by public collections in Great Britain and worldwide, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
Gordon Baldwin’s wife Nancy died in 2021 and survived from her daughter and two sons.
Gordon Baldwin, born on July 10, 1932, died on May 18, 2025
