Sol Bailey Barker
Sol Bailey Barker (b. 1987) is a British multidisciplinary artist working primarily with sculpture, sound, and performance. Informed by the development of technologies that were for millennia seen as shamanic for their transformative power upon the landscape and their influence over life and death.
Bailey Barker’s practice explores the ever changing ecosystem and follows the journey of augmentation from the ancient sacred axe to contemporary technology that has largely driven these transformations.
Bailey Barker’s abstract sculptures draw from symbolism and objects they study, using materials associated with both agriculture and industry to provoke an association between the industrial born from technological development and its ancient spiritual origins.
Creating abstract sculptures and building immersive installations, they create a tangible connection to this ephemeral past and reveal how it continues to influence our present and our future.
Drawing on the symbolic and material histories embedded in landscape, their work seeks to bridge past and future to propose new modes of ecological consciousness.
Bailey Barker’s work has been exhibited across Europe and the Americas, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Bogotá (Colombia), Bold Tendencies, Lamb Gallery, Alice Black, Beaux Arts and Proposition (London) Tuleste Gallery (NYC ), Impakto (Lima ), Furiosa Zona Maco (Mexico City) Mahala Berlin Art Week (Berlin).
The long winter draws to a close and the Wildermen awaken to perform the rituals that beckon the spring. Set between an ancient woodland and an urban wasteland, 'Wyrd Then : Weird Now' follows two parallel timelines in, which the Wildermen embody the spirits of the landscape; flickering between the untouched forest and an urban dystopia.
Directed and Edited by Sol Bailey Barker
Mask and Costumes by Sol Bailey Barker
Cinematography by Ruben Woodin Dechamps
Sound by Joe Farley and Sol Bailey Barker