Deep Time Signals

2018–2023

Deep Time Signals gathers works that listen for transmissions arriving across vast distances of time, scale and matter. Wind, light, stone, gravity and stellar dust move through these works as pressure, vibration and cue rather than image. This field formed through full-spectrum pinhole photography, astro timelapse, bilateral and topo-somatic drawing, and long-duration weather-led moving image.

By 2019 this listening expanded into sound through Aeolian harps built and designed by Ross Annels. These instruments capture wind as moving structure rather than atmosphere, translating geological breath into vibration. A primary harp used across this body of work gathers wind off the 300 million year old mountain behind our home. Wind becomes instrument. Mountain becomes lung.

Sound, image and bodily response developed together through long periods of shared attention to weather. Harp vibration, pinhole and full-spectrum light, and hand-led drawing unfolded as a conversation between air pressure, planetary motion, nervous system and place. The work did not arrive through control but through ongoing adjustment and reply.

This material culminated in the film work 14 Billion Years Ago Now (2021–2023), which braids astro timelapses, wind-harp vibration, pinhole light and bodily mark making across days, months and years. Days fold into nights. Nights fold into seasons. Human scale dissolves into orbital scale and returns again through the body.

Deep Time Signals is not concerned with depicting the cosmos or geology. It responds to them as ongoing transmission. Light that left its source before human civilisation. Winds shaped by ancient ranges. Dust carrying stellar collapse. These signals arrive without asking permission. They bend trees, shift rivers, alter bone memory and recalibrate nervous systems.

My health and disrupted autonomic function shape how I receive these signals. Environmental change cues bodily change. I watch how this place adapts to rupture and slow drift in order to learn how I might adapt too. Creeks reroute. Rocks gather. Forests migrate. Movement becomes instruction rather than metaphor.

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. Sound, vibration, light and wind response were shaped through shared attention to the forces moving through the site.

If Everything is Speaking is a shared ecological field, Deep Time Signals is its long-range horizon. It listens to what moves through us from distances too large to stand inside.

These works do not resolve deep time into meaning.

They keep it moving.