Deep Listening to Deep Time is an immersive, artist-led listening and making session that invites participants to encounter geological time through slow attention, touch, and sound.
Developed from the ongoing project Do Rocks Remember Lava? (DRRL), a multisensory curatorial inquiry into geological agency, deep time, and non-extractive modes of engagement, the session extends the project’s sonic and speculative concerns into a participatory, small-group setting. Where earlier iterations have unfolded through sound, performance, and text, this workshop turns toward collective, embodied encounter.
Participants will be guided through a series of sensory exercises: handling rocks, making rubbings, and engaging in forms of “deep listening” informed by both fieldwork and experimental sound practices. Structured across four stages, the workshop gradually builds toward the creation of a layered collage, which participants may take home as a trace of their engagement. This material outcome is secondary to the process itself – emerging from sustained attention, tactile exploration, and shared experience.
The session is organised around key geological processes, sedimentary layering, fossilisation, igneous formation, and metamorphic transformation, each approached not as abstract categories, but as distinct experiences of time. Through touch, mark-making, and attentive observation, participants will explore how stones might hold, transmit, or resist memory, and how different materials register duration, pressure, rupture, and change.
Live sonic elements will punctuate the workshop, with contributions from sound artists (TBC). Responding in real time to the materials, actions, and atmosphere of the session, these interventions introduce an additional layer of encounter, translating geological processes into vibration and duration, and extending participants’ sensory engagement beyond the purely tactile or visual.
Fossils and traces of organic matter introduce questions of presence and absence, inviting reflection on what persists and what disappears, both within the geological record and in lived experience. The session also opens a space to consider contemporary climate change as a disruption of deep time, where extraction, erosion, and acceleration unsettle the temporal scales that geology traditionally holds.
Together, we will ask what it means to listen beyond the human scale, and how attuning to geological materials might shift our sense of time, history, and responsibility. The emphasis remains on process rather than outcome, cultivating a reflective environment that prioritises care, curiosity, and shared attention.
The session is gentle and exploratory, with no prior knowledge of geology or art required. It is suitable for adults and young people aged 14+, though younger participants are welcome with supervision.
Accessibility: Please get in touch if cost is a barrier to attending. The event is designed to be as inclusive as possible, with seated and low-mobility options available throughout. Activities can be adapted for different access needs, and participation in any element is optional. Materials will be provided. Please note that some elements involve handling natural materials that may mark or soil hands and clothing. The session includes attentive, embodied making and listening alongside live sound; participants are welcome to bring earplugs or headphones if required (a limited number will be available). A calm, small-group environment will be maintained, with a scheduled break and flexibility for additional pauses as needed.
Tickets: £26.60
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An event in the Scottish Geology Festival 2026, organised by the Scottish Geology Trust. Please support us: Discover – Support – Join.
