Gordon Baldwin was 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 evolved was a kind of three-dimensional drawing. He used the language of vessel-making as a springboard for his explorations, a "diary of thought" as he 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 did the meetings of land and water. The pots were, in effect, distilled 'inscapes' (a phrase he liked) of thought and memory.

Baldwin (1932-2025) trained at Lincoln School of Art and the Central School in London, his roots as grounded in painting as clay, the medium which he found most conducive to his explorations with colour, shape and surface. He was a notable teacher, most particularly at the Central School and Eton College. His vocabulary ranged from bowls to more complex articulated shapes, often monolithic in nature, but what underlined all his work was 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