Gordon Baldwin rises early and will usually complete a couple of hours' work in the studio before breakfast. He will then return intermittently through the day — beginning with the quite speedy process of coiling and building up the clay, of pausing, and then more building. The piece will then grow more slowly, decisions are gradually made - basic matters of structure, of evolving a shape or the direction of a rim and, when leatherhard, deciding where to make an opening, how to mark a surface. Then there is the matter of glazing, the complex layering of surface with rich subtleties of its own - about different depths of texture as well as colour. They reveal Baldwin's richly subtle and varied brushwork, his gifts as a painter. The development of the piece may take place over several weeks, with several firings. Baldwin's sculptures are vessels in every sense, not just because they are broadly based in the archetypal language of containment (though his work is a far cry from traditional 'pottery') but because they carry ideas, they allow him to travel, to go to other places — exotic, dark, silent, fanciful, beautiful - much as ships do.
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