In conversation with Sol Bailey Barker

“My work isn’t prescriptive, it's invitational. I think of it as a kind of mycelial thinking: slow, networked, rhizomatic.”

 - Sol Bailey Barker

Sol Bailey Barker.

Sol Bailey Barker is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice navigates the intersections of ecology, mythology, and speculative futures. Working across sculpture, sound, and immersive installation, Bailey Barker engages with materials, ancient knowledge systems, and emerging technologies to interrogate the evolving relationship between humans and the natural world.

Drawing on the symbolic and material histories embedded in landscape, their work bridges past and future to propose new modes of ecological consciousness. Through a process that is both research-driven and intuitively grounded, Bailey Barker creates charged environments that invite reflection, transformation, and a reorientation toward a more-than-human, animist perspective, one that sees the world as pansentient.

We spoke with Sol about their latest exhibition, Pansentient Arboriculture, showing at Proposition Bethnal Green. The show explores a care system where trees and forests are seen as sentient beings with consciousness. It examines our cultural and spiritual connections to trees, alongside ecological practices like agroforestry and preservation. Drawing inspiration from Albion folklore and crafted from Sussex wood, the exhibition connects us to the ancient wisdom of our ancestors.

What first inspired you to focus on trees and the natural world in your work?
It began with a sense of listening. Not just to trees as living beings, but to the spaces around them, the silences, the absences, the way light changes in their company. I think I was always searching for language beyond the human, and the natural world offers both metaphor and reality. Trees are timekeepers, memory-holders, and kin. They invite slowness, which in a world growing ever faster feels like a form of protest.

Your exhibition Pansentient Arboriculture proposes that trees and forests have a form of consciousness. How did this idea develop, and what does it mean to you?
The idea emerged through a cross-pollination of science, folklore, and intuition. Research into mycorrhizal networks, Indigenous cosmologies, and ancient mythologies all pointed to a reality that Western frameworks have long denied that trees know, in a way that is non-verbal, communal, and deeply attuned. To me, pansentience is less a hypothesis and more a worldview, one where everything is in relationship, and nothing is inert.

Installation view Pansentient Arboriculture, Sol Bailey Barker, Proposition. Image credit Manu Valcarce.

The exhibition draws on the folklore of Albion and Druidic knowledge. How do these histories inform your sculptures and installations?
These lineages offer maps emotional, ecological, and spiritual. I’m interested in how pre-industrial cultures perceived the land as animate, storied, and sacred. Druidic knowledge, for example, didn’t separate the spiritual from the ecological. My work often draws on these echoes, not to recreate the past, but to compost it into something alive and urgent for the future.

Your work brings together materials like Sussex wood, abstract forms, and sound. How do these elements work together to shape the viewer’s experience?
I think of materials as collaborators. Sussex wood holds its own history, the winds it’s weathered, the soil it’s grown in and the seasons it's witnessed. The abstract forms invite a kind of interpretive wandering, while the sound pulls the viewer inward, into a more embodied, less ocular way of knowing. Together, they create a sensory ecology that asks the viewer to slow down and reattune.

Installation view Pansentient Arboriculture, Sol Bailey Barker, Proposition. Image credit Manu Valcarce.

In the woven hazel and willow installation, visitors are invited to lie down and engage with sound. What do you hope this reveals about our relationship with nature?
To lie down is to surrender a little. It shifts the power dynamic and we become vulnerable, receptive. I want people to feel the land holding them, to remember that we are not apart from nature but continuous with it. Sound helps dissolve boundaries; it's ephemeral, atmospheric, and strangely intimate. The wonderful Zoe Bedeux reads my science fiction story that imagines a future ecologically integrated green london. The oral tradition is how we received knowledge for most of our shared history, so I think it speaks to something ancient and inherent in our ancestry . My hope is that people leave the piece with a sense of interconnection.

You speak about ‘Ancient Futurism’ and a future rooted in respect for nature. How do you see your work contributing to ecological thinking today?
‘Ancient Futurism’ is a term I use to imagine futures where ancient ecological knowledge is not just remembered but reactivated. My work isn’t prescriptive, it's invitational. I think of it as a kind of mycelial thinking: slow, networked, rhizomatic. In a time of climate emergency, I want to offer spaces for reimagining, for deep time dreaming, for remembering symbiosis.

How do you envision your practice growing in the coming years, and what ideas or themes do you want to continue exploring?
I want to keep collaborating with forests and with other ecosystems, with scientists and storytellers. I'm drawn to ideas of restoration, guided rewilding where our role is that of caretakers  (both ecological and emotional), and more experiments with sound and ritual. I’m also curious about how this work might move outside the gallery and into the land itself, I think we need art that breathes with the seasons.

Installation view Pansentient Arboriculture, Sol Bailey Barker, Proposition. Image credit Manu Valcarce.

The [Quick] #FLODown:

Best life advice?
Grow roots, not walls.

Last song you listened to?
Nazo Nazo by Kikagaku Moyo.

Last book you read?
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (again).

Can’t live without…?
Making sculptures.

What should the art world be more of and less of?
More reciprocity, less extraction.

Pansentient Arboriculture runs from 25 April to 7 June 2025 at Proposition Bethnal Green, 279 Cambridge Heath Rd, London E2 0EL.

Website: solbaileybarker.com

Instagram: @solbaileybarker