Deep Time Signals

2018–ongoing

Deep Time Signals brings together works that track transmissions arriving through wind, light, pressure, gravity, and time. These works attend to forces that act across planetary, geological, and stellar scales, registering in bodies as vibration, movement, and response.

This body of work developed through full-spectrum pinhole photography, astro timelapse, bilateral and topo-somatic drawing, and long-duration, weather-led moving image. The work grows through sustained attention to forces that register slowly and unevenly, often outside immediate human perception.

Light, wind, stone, and gravity are approached as active carriers. Interstellar chemicals, celestial compounds, and geological gestures arrive as pressure rather than image. Transmission here is not symbolic. It is physical, cumulative, and ongoing.

By 2019 this attention extended into sound through multiple Aeolian harps built and designed by Ross Annels. These instruments translate wind into vibration, receiving air pressure moving off the 300-million-year-old mountain behind our home. Wind is taken as structure. Sound registers its passage.

Sound, image, and bodily response developed together through long periods of working with the same forces and site. Harp vibration, pinhole and full-spectrum light, and hand-led drawing unfold through reply rather than direction. Planetary motion, air pressure, nervous system, and place remain in conversation.

These processes culminated in the film 14 Billion Years Ago Now (2021–2023). Astro timelapses, wind-harp vibration, pinhole light, and bodily mark-making are woven across days, nights, seasons, and years. Human time loosens into orbital time, then gathers again through the body.

Deep Time Signals does not present deep time as image or spectacle. It stays with transmission. Light that left its source before human civilisation. Winds shaped by ancient ranges. Dust formed through stellar collapse. These forces arrive without orientation to human scale, yet register materially in trees, landforms, watercourses, nervous systems, and bone.

My body responds strongly to environmental change. This has led me to consider how sensory thresholds, intergenerational memory, and epigenetic traits may be cued by conditions that exceed a single lifetime. Atmospheric pressure, light, and weather systems appear to trigger bodily responses that do not belong solely to the present.

I track these responses through daily internal and external weather-taking. Bilateral and topo-somatic drawing become a way of registering how signals arrive, lodge, and move through the body. Hands respond to pressure. Marks accumulate. Patterns appear without instruction.

I watch how this place adapts under ongoing change. Creeks find new paths. Fallen rocks become mounds for life. River mouths shift. Forests migrate slowly. By attending to how land bends, re-routes, and holds pressure, I try to learn how adaptation might occur within my own body, whose automatic pilot is calibrated to another time.

The Artisan collaboration The Breeze at Dawn Has Secrets to Tell You… sits within this field as a tactile extension of wind listening. Ross Annels built the Aeolian harps used in this work. Wind, sound, vibration, light, and bodily response developed through repeated work with the same site and conditions.

If Everything is Speaking gathers a shared ecological field, Deep Time Signals holds a long temporal horizon. It listens to what moves through bodies from distances too large to stand inside.

These works do not resolve deep time.

They remain with its movement.