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
Tyler Goldflower (US)  Photography

Conversations with Rocks emerges as a quietly radical act of attunement a collaborative investigation between sculptor Sol Bailey Barker and photographer Tyler Goldflower, exploring the blurred thresholds between animate and inanimate, ritual and resonance, body and stone.

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. At 7.83 Hz, the Earth murmurs through its geomagnetic field a frequency that pulses beneath all living beings, often referred to as the planet’s “heartbeat.” Here, the rock becomes not mute but resonant a witness, a holder of memory, an ancient interlocutor.

Over six weeks in remote terrains, Bailey Barker enacted a series of daily ritual performances in dialogue with these geological presences gestures of offering, listening, resistance, and surrender. Goldflower, with a sensitivity attuned to temporal fragility, captured these ephemeral exchanges on 35mm film. The images function not simply as documentation but as meditative apparitions: an archive of movement, stillness, and elemental intimacy.

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 speech.