Gordon Baldwin is an artist who, as the late Henry Rothschild put it "works from the inside out", building up each piece and marking surface so that what evolves is a kind of three-dimensional drawing. He has used the language of vessel-making as a springboard for his explorations, a "diary of thought" as he has put it, and reflective of his absorption of all kinds of landscape, in art and literature, and most especially in music and the formative places important to him, particularly coastal ones, loving as he does the meetings of land and water. The pots are, in effect, distilled 'inscapes' (a phrase he likes) of thought and memory.

Born in 1932, Baldwin trained at Lincoln School of Art and the Central in London, his roots as grounded in painting as clay, the medium which he has found most conducive to his explorations with colour, shape and surface. He has been a notable teacher, most particularly at the Central School and Eton College. His vocabulary has ranged from bowls to more complex articulated shapes, often monolithic in nature, but what underlines all his work is its personal autobiographical quality. His art has helped to move ceramics away from a primarily functional language to one that is more open, searching and freshly expressive.

David Whiting