Exploring gold as a material, symbol and political force, Lisa Barnard traces its presence in the myths and alchemy of past centuries to its role in contemporary global finance and technology. The Canary and The Hammer brings together photography and archival material to question our enduring relationship with this precious metal and the systems of power it sustains.
In conversation, Lisa Barnard will reflect on the long process of making this work, her approach to documentary practice, and the intersections of politics, ecology and image-making that shape her projects.
Moderated by artist and researcher Sam Nightingale.
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Biographies
Lisa Barnard (b.1967, UK) is an artist, researcher and teacher whose photographic practice addresses real events using traditional methods, alongside more contemporary visual and computer forms. Her work explores the current political climate and the military-industrial complex, with technological innovation, perception and new ecologies. Barnard combines her interest in aesthetics with multi-layered visual presentations.
Barnard’s work has been exhibited widely in museums and at photography festivals. She is an Associate Professor and Head of the Master’s Programme in Documentary Photography at the University of South Wales. She has published three books: Hyena of the Battlefield and Machines in the Garden (both published by GOST Books), and The Canary and The Hammer (published by MACK, 2019). Barnard won the After Nature Prize 2025 and will show the winning project at C/O Berlin in autumn 2025.
Sam Nightingale is a UK-based artist-researcher working at the intersection of environmental media, experimental photography and speculative fieldwork. His practice investigates “spectral ecologies”—entangled histories of human and more-than-human life embedded in salt, soil, plants and in the afterlife of extractive infrastructures. Grounded in expanded fieldwork methodologies, his work combines site-based investigation, sensory media, and collaborative research across diverse terrains and climates. He is co-editor of Fieldwork for Future Ecologies: Radical Practice for Art and Art-based Research (2024), a publication that reimagines fieldwork as a creative and speculative mode of inquiry. He regularly contributes to publications, residencies, and exhibitions on environmental aesthetics and media theory, and he teaches at the Royal College of Art.
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