SOL BAILEY BARKER

CONVERSATIONS with Rocks

ALMANAQUE fotográfica

MEXICO CITY Mexico 2023

 Conversations with Rocks
Almanaque Fotográfica – CDMX – April–May 2023
Sol Bailey Barker (UK)  Sculpture & Performance
Tyler Goldflower (US) documentation Photography

Conversations with Rocks

First conceived in the suspended time of lockdown, the project began as a personal practice of communion: Bailey Barker, seated among the flora of his garden, began to meditate on the vibrational language of stones. Contemplating the sentience of rocks, I listen to the rock, the rock hums at 7.83 hertz, we can think of it like the Earth’s heartbeat. This frequency is the electromagnetic field that surrounds and protects all living things.

Over six weeks Bailey Barker enacted a series of daily ritual performances ´Conversations with Rocks´ presences gestures of offering, listening, resistance, and surrender. Goldflower captured these ephemeral exchanges on 35mm film.

This body of work resists binary divisions between nature and human, form and formlessness. It invites us to reconsider sentience as something non-anthropocentric, as a field of relationality shared across bodies mineral, vegetal, flesh. In doing so, Conversations with Rocks gestures toward a quiet, grounded mysticism where the stone becomes a subject, not an object; where listening becomes sculpture; and where time itself is reimagined as a slow unfolding of silent dialog.