Ancient Futurism (eng. version)

Sol Bailey Barker approaches sculpture as a way of tracing the fragile and shifting ties between the human body and the natural world. His forms, rooted in myth and matter, open a contemplative space where nature appears not as backdrop, but as an active and living presence.

Sol Bailey Barker explores for Intervalo the sculptural image as a living threshold between matter, myth, and ecological thought. Through totemic forms, ancestral memory, and a poetics of the unfinished, he reflects on how sculpture can reopen our relationship with nature and position the viewer as an active presence in the work’s meaning. A meditation on abstraction, belonging, and the shifting passage between past, present and future.

Aperture and ecology

Your work engages with the relationship between humans and the natural world. How did this line of inquiry first emerge in your practice?

My fascination predates my artistic practice; it has been a life long fascination since my childhood. It began in North Wales where I lived in the Snowdonia national park. I have never experienced myself as separate from nature. My earliest memories are of observing insects and plants interacting. I would lift rocks and examine the complex networks beneath, channels, chambers, stores and I would always place them back exactly as I found them. I did not see myself as superior to the natural world, but as part of it. That sense has never left me. 

I was given my first chisels at the age of 3 and began to carve small sculptures in wood, mirroring forms I saw in the natural world around me, by the age of six I was able to create small carvings of animals that were representative. My grandparents still have some of these.

In your practice matter, nature and perception intersect. What do you think art can do to shape our ecological consciousness?

In the realm of pan-sentience, the boundaries we draw between beings begin to dissolve. We are drawn into a contemplative exploration of intelligence that resides not only in animals or humans, but throughout the botanical domain and beyond. A profound tapestry of interconnectedness unfolds a symphony of symbiotic relationships; a hive mind we have come to call the Wood Wide Web. 

Our failure to recognise this intelligence stems from what is known as plant blindness, a prejudice rooted in biased thinking that refuses to accept non-human cognition. This bias can be traced back to Aristotle, who divided the natural world into “inactive” plants and

“active” animals. This alongside 

Novum Organum first published 1620, in which Francis Bacon proposed a fundamental shift in the purpose of science: moving away from purely contemplative philosophy toward an active, practical approach where nature is commanded and used to improve the human condition. This created a false hierarchy which has been continuously reinforced, providing moral cover for our abuse of the living world and ushering in the era we now call the Anthropocene. 

Animism offers another way of seeing. It allows us to perceive all things as sentient, alive, and meaningful. Physics, meanwhile, frees us from the illusion of separateness, revealing our profound entanglement with everything. Between these paradigms exists abstraction, an ethereal realm where forms echo the past while gesturing towards unknown futures. It is this abstraction through art that we can dream of new futures.

What interests you in the relationship between humans, matter, and landscape?

From quantum physics we inherit superstring theory and the concept of pocket dimensions worlds within worlds. From microscopy to LiDAR, from the micro to the macro, technology allows us to glimpse once-invisible realms. These tangible dimensions of scale expand our perception beyond human senses and hint at realities still beyond our grasp. 

Reality, then, is not fixed. It is layered, relational, alive. Light, water, and fire, essential forces of life have always been used as metaphors for creation and transformation. Water gives life and brings death. Fire warms, protects, destroys, and transforms. Smoke drifts into invisible worlds. These elements form the interface between physical and spiritual realities, mirrors between worlds. 

The mind itself is such a mirror. Consciousness generates and responds to realities beyond everyday experience, transforming thoughts into images, objects, rituals, and myths. This impulse to reshape reality through belief, symbol, and story is fundamental to human behaviour. Homo sapiens is also homo religiosus. 

Our closest ancestors, chimpanzees, are now observed storing stones in hollow trees in proto-ritualistic acts. They perform rain dances, stand transfixed before fire. The sacred impulse predates us. 

We live not outside nature, but inside it. We are not observers of reality; we are participants in it. 

And the question remains: Can we remember how to live as part of the cycle once again?

Mythical

When you have said «Totemic carvings of ash, redwood and oak bring archetypal forms from the unconscious to light, their shamanic shapes suggesting the endurance of the mythological as the accumulated wisdom of generations», do you feel that your sculptures revive this ritual dimension accumulated over generations, offering the viewer a mystical experience.

Sculpture becomes a way to hold time, ecology, myth, trauma, and hope simultaneously. Wood, an ancient material, anchors the work in deep time. Abstraction allows it to remain open, unresolved, alive. 

The artist is always at the mercy of the subconscious. Things that cannot be said directly emerge through form. The subconscious speaks without words. 

Technology complicates this relationship. We are now post-human in many respects.

Technology has been part of the problem but can it be used to fix it? 

Drones, facial recognition, artificial intelligence, these technologies can erase entire populations if misused. Yet technology also allows us to see invisible worlds. 

From quantum physics we inherit the idea of pocket dimensions worlds within worlds.

From art, we inherit the ability to imagine them. 

Abstraction is not withdrawal. It is engagement at a deeper frequency.

Following the previous question, do you think the materials you use carry a particular wisdom from different traditions? What guides your choice of materials when constructing these forms?

Objects themselves become vessels of myth. Power objects, axes, crosses, stones are imbued with significance far beyond their material form. The Neolithic axe head was not only a tool but a sacred object. Often found buried in wetlands at boundaries between territories, wrapped in ritual bindings, passed down as heirlooms, these objects carried ancestral memory and authority. Pagan traditions never vanished; they were absorbed, suppressed, and re-emerged in altered forms. Green Men and Green Women appear in churches across Europe, remnants of older tree worship adapted, or resisted within Christian iconography. Sheela-na-gigs, though rarer, persist as powerful symbols of fertility and protection.

Which relation do you see between the ancestral and the contemporary in your work?

The block universe theory first proposed by C. D. Broad in (1923) and contemporarily championed by Michael Tooley and Peter Forrest, proposes that time is not linear. Past, present, and future coexist simultaneously. “Now” is merely an arbitrary position within a complete temporal structure. If this is true, then the mushrooms that laid the foundations for life on land billions of years ago, the first stone shaped into a tool, the first ritual, the last ritual, the last human in space all of it is present and reverberating here and now. Many of us understand this instinctively through Sacred places. Sites visited continuously across millennia possess a particular resonance, as if all time were folded into a single moment. Perhaps all people who have passed through have left remnants of themselves creating a space that becomes sentient through the collective unconscious.

Ancient futurism emerges from this understanding. In a world where science fiction rapidly becomes scientific fact, we must look to the many traditions of the past and learn from our ancestors if we are to build a sustainable future. 

From quantum physics we inherit superstring theory and the concept of pocket dimensions worlds within worlds. From microscopy to LiDAR, from the micro to the macro, technology allows us to glimpse once-invisible realms. These tangible dimensions of scale expand our perception beyond human senses and hint at realities still beyond our grasp. 

Reality, then, is not fixed. It is layered, relational, alive. Light, water, and fire, essential forces of life have always been used as metaphors for creation and transformation. Water gives life and brings death. Fire warms, protects, destroys, and transforms. Smoke drifts into invisible worlds. These elements form the interface between physical and spiritual realities, mirrors between worlds.

Spectatorship

What do you want the viewer to wonder when standing in front of your work?

The mind generates images of worlds beyond nature, and through belief, ritual, and object-making, those worlds reshape everyday life. 

Humans have always done this. We are homo sapiens and homo religiosus. We create stories, images, objects, and rituals to reduce anxiety, forge meaning, and bind communities together. 

This is not delusion. It is survival. 

Mythology and superstition are not opposites of reason. They are parallel forms of intelligence. The axe that symbolised thunder, the severed head that carried prophecy, the mushroom that opened perception these were technologies of understanding. Ancient futurism asks us to remember this without romanticising it. It asks us to weave ancestral wisdom with modern knowledge, not as nostalgia, but as necessity. The future cannot be built without memory.

Returning to nature, when you create a work, do you want it to act as a mediator between nature and the human being, reconnecting us in some way with the environment?

We inherit the world not as it should have been, but as it is. We do not inherit the sins of our ancestors, but we inherit the consequences. We inherit damaged ecosystems, broken systems, unresolved trauma, and unexamined myths. What we choose to do with that inheritance determines whether there is a future at all. 

The arc of history is often said to bend toward justice. But it does not bend on its own. It bends only when people are strong enough to see clearly and brave enough to act. We live in the remains of the gods. We inhabit systems built on extraction, domination, and illusion. We have mistaken growth for progress, accumulation for value, convenience for wisdom. We have confused technological capability with moral maturity. 

And yet everything we need to survive already exists. 

Indigenous cultures show us this. Fungi shows us this. Insects show us this. Forests show us this. Reciprocity, diversity, cooperation, and restraint are not ideals; they are survival strategies refined over millions of years. 

The obsession with control has led us to the brink. Agriculture stripped of biodiversity. Technology stripped of ethics. Culture stripped of meaning. Trauma stripped of recognition.

Denial has become policy. 

Denial is the most poisonous force of all. It eats away silently, manifesting as anger, violence, repression, and collapse. Unacknowledged trauma is passed on unconsciously through families, through nations, through species. 

Healing requires courage. The courage to feel wounds rather than flee them. The courage to grieve for what has been lost. The courage to recognise patterns and interrupt them.

The courage to examine ourselves honestly before passing damage forward. This is not easy. It is painful. But it is necessary.

What role do you want the viewer to have when encountering your work?

Abstraction exists in the space between animism and science. It is not an escape from meaning, but a condensation of it. Forms arise not as illustrations, but as residues, impressions left behind by forces acting through the subconscious, memory, dream, and instinct. 

In discussion regarding his shared understanding of space with the sculptor Eduardo chilida, Martin Heidegger wrote “we would have to learn to recognise that things themselves are places and do not merely belong to places.” (Published in their 1969 artist book Art and Space /Die Kunst und der Raum).

Close

What do you want to leave open or incomplete in your work? I think that it should always be left open to interpretation, nothing should be definitive.

The forms present in my work are compositions of forces that exist in the mind and in dreams, arising consciously or unconsciously during the process of making. Circles, triangles, squares, irregular organic shapes, natural elements such as water, fire, air, earth, ether; substances that are liquid or solid, hot or cold, hard or soft. All of this is reconstructed, forming an imagined realm where macrocosm and melting microcosm unite in the wanderings of a free and independent soul.

Which dimensions or narratives would you like to continue exploring within the intersection of art and ecology?

Myth is not fiction. It is a language older than history, a way of encoding knowledge before writing, a method of understanding the world through symbol, ritual, and repetition. Across cultures and continents, the same forms return again and again not by coincidence, but because they speak to something deep and shared within the human psyche. 

The tree of life is one of the most enduring of these archetypes. It appears across religions, mythologies, and philosophies as a cosmic structure connecting heaven, earth, and the underworld. Jung believed that myths and dreams were expressions of the collective unconscious, core ideas embedded within humanity itself, perhaps through evolution, perhaps through spiritual inheritance. 

The tree of life appears in ancient Mesopotamia, Urartu, ancient Iran, Buddhism, Chinese mythology, Christianity, Norse mythology, Germanic paganism, Mayan religion, Native North American traditions, Hinduism, Judaism, Turkic faiths, and many others. In Norse mythology it appears as Yggdrasil, the world tree, often described as a yew or ash, whose roots and branches hold all realms of existence. Germanic tribes honoured sacred trees, such as Thor’s Oak, while the druids revered groves as living temples. 

In Mesoamerican cosmologies, world trees embodied the four cardinal directions, forming a symbolic axis mundi that connected sky, earth, and underworld. These forms appear repeatedly in the art of the Maya, Aztec, Olmec, Mixtec, and Izapan cultures. The Assyrian tree of life appears as a series of nodes and criss-crossing lines, often attended by winged genies blessing it with bucket and cone symbols of fertilisation and renewal.

Is there a particular concept or theme that you haven't yet integrated into your practice, but are compelled to explore?

We are ancient transhumanists. Long before the word existed, the impulse was already there. From the first fire-hardened wooden spear to flight, from language to machines, humans have always sought to transcend limitation. The desire to acquire new capacities is as old as our species itself. 

Language itself may have evolved from tool-making. Scholars such as Michael Corballis and Terrence Deacon suggest that early humans developed language to coordinate complex tasks, to synchronise effort, to plan and build together. The neural regions involved in language are deeply intertwined with those used for planning and executing tool use.

Thought, speech, and technology co-evolved. 

Technology has always been met with ambivalence. The ancient Greeks understood this tension through myth. Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity, forever improving the human condition, yet he was punished for his transgression. Daedalus used ingenuity rather than magic to extend human capability, but disaster followed when Icarus ignored limits and flew too close to the sun. 

Hubris is the warning threaded through all technological myths. Some ambitions, the ancients believed, come with unbearable cost. 

Today, the scale of our tools has outpaced our wisdom. Artificial intelligence, drones, facial recognition, and data surveillance give unprecedented power. Using social media data and automated weapons, it would be possible to target populations by ethnicity, gender, or belief. Technology has not made us more ethical; it has amplified whatever values we already carry. 

At the same time, technology reveals invisible worlds. From microscopy to LiDAR, from the micro to the macro, we now perceive realities once inaccessible to human senses. Satellites reveal planetary systems. Microscopes expose cellular universes. These revelations can inspire humility or domination. 

Physics and spirituality converge here. Both seek to understand reality. Both acknowledge interconnectedness. The observer effect suggests that observation itself alters outcome. Spiritual traditions echo this insight: consciousness shapes reality. David Bohm wrote that the illusion of separateness leads directly to conflict and crisis. Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us that wave and water are not separate, they are manifestations of the same thing. In this light, pan-sentience is not fantasy. It is an ethical position. Intelligence is not confined to the human. It exists in systems, networks, relationships.