Trees have lived on Earth since long before human life appeared. They have watched over and nurtured us from our very infancy, providing us with the air we breathe, the food we eat, shade to shelter us and materials to build our homes and fuel technological progress.
Trees are metaphors for our own lives: mirroring our need for protection and foundations; our yearning for freedom and lightness; our desire to grow and disperse; and our will to become unique individuals while remaining part of a far-reaching community of fellow beings.
Yet we persist in cutting down forests, allowing their ancient wisdom to fall on deaf ears. While many diverse communities are actively cultivating and protecting woodland, others are engaging in deforestation and destruction.
Proposition presents Pansentient Arboriculture, a new solo exhibition by artist Sol Bailey Barker which proposes a system of care in which trees and entire forests are considered sentient and aware, having a form of consciousness. This exhibition decodes our relationship with the arboreal world, or the world of trees, considering their cultural and spiritual roles, as well as practices such as agroforestry and ecological Preservation. Drawing on the folklore of Albion, or Ancient Great Britain, and carved from the trees of Sussex, the exhibition builds a bridge to the world our ancestors lived in, extending from their knowledge.
Bailey Barker presents a body of work which highlights how trees are central to our wellbeing and long-term flourishing. The abstract sculptures, formed from the trunks of trees, bring the organic forms and textures of the wood into conversation with the mythologies of Albion. In this way, the artworks presented here honour both the material and spiritual life of trees and the intertwined histories of arboreal and human life, exploring the tangible and intangible nature of our relationship with trees.
Acknowledging the age of the Anthropocene, an unofficial unit of geologic time during which humans have had a substantial impact on our planet, his practice is rooted in Ancient Futurism, Druidic knowledge, land stewardship, and modern technologies. Pansentient Arboriculture offers a vision for a harmonious future and a way of life that respects and protects nature.The work responds to the subconscious realm that shapes the collective, cultivating a stronger sense of community with all living entities.
In the structure of woven hazel and willow in Gallery 2, you are invited to lay and gaze up at the weaving. Within this installation there is a sound piece titled The Loom: The Archive of Living Memory. The story is written by Sol Bailey Barker and voiced by artist Zoe Bedeaux Aka T.I.P The Invisible Prophetess, Poetess, Protest. Zoe is an autopoietic, interdisciplinary artist and founder of Witchcrafted by Vida Cosmotics.
The exhibition also features a poem by Ibrahim Mukhayer, An Elegy to Unhearing Humanity – a text to re-enchant our relationship to the tree, while illustrating the ceaseless gifts and atemporal reflections that humanity draws from the exchange with the arboreal world.
Sol Bailey Barker, Pansentient Arboriculture, 25th April 2025 – 7th June 2025 Proposition Gallery
Pansentient Arboriculture Reading List by Sol Bailey Barker
John Clare – Selected Poems
William Bryant Logan – Oak: The Frame of Civilisation
Fred Hageneder -The Heritage of Trees: History of Culture and Symbolism
Stefano Mancusco – The Nation of Plants
Laura Riva – The Social Life of Trees: Anthropological Perspectives on Tree Symbolism
Diana Beresford Kroeger – Arboretum Borealis: A Life line of the Planet
Beatriz Colomina & Mark Wigley – Are We Human: Notes on Archeology of Design
Octavia Butler – The Parable of the Sower
Ursula K. Le Guin – The Word for World is Forest
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing -The Mushroom at the End of the World: On The Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
James Bridle – Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
Haruki Murakami – Kafka on the Shore
Olga Tokarczuk – Drive your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
James Lovelock – Novacene: The Coming Age of HyperIntelligence
Gary Snyder – The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry and Translations
Jason Allen-Paisant – Thinking with Trees
Robert Macfarlane – Landmarks
Merlin Sheldrake – Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures
Robin Wall Kimmerer – Braiding Sweet Grass
Suzanne Simard – Finding the Mother Trees
Virginia Woolf – Orlando
John Berger – Confabulations (Into the Woods essay)
Brian C. Muraresku – The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name
About the artist
Sol Bailey Barker Blurring the boundaries between the archaic and the futuristic, Sol Bailey Barker’s sculptural practice is a dialogue between materiality, myth, and technology. His works, shaped from wood, metal, and clay, possess a duality simultaneously relics of an ancient past and fragments of an imagined future. Infused with a deep reverence for nature and the spiritual traditions of early civilisations, his sculptures evoke a sense of ritual, inviting a contemplation of humanity’s interconnectedness across time.
Bailey Barker’s practice is informed by extensive research into anthropology, archaeology, and the evolution of sacred objects and technology. Themes of transformation, survival, and transcendence permeate his work, reflecting his own near-death experience as a child a profound event that catalysed his exploration of consciousness and the liminal space between worlds. His sculptures, whether monumental or intimate, operate as vessels of memory and myth, charged with the energy of the materials from which they are born. @solbaileybarker
