Taking the environments and technologies of Scotland’s Far North as a rich context for practice and research, Timespan’s Practicing Deep Time group residency offers resident artists the time to develop work relating to the concept of Deep Time within a discursive group setting.

Timespan’s programme is theme-led, creating a vibrant cross-disciplinary conversation through all areas of the organisation. In 2017/18 our thematic focus is Deep Time, the distant past behind us and the distant future ahead. The Practicing Deep Time group residency occurs in advance of this public programme, bringing artists into the internal discourse around the theme and with the intention that some of the work or relationships developed on the residency might feed into the forthcoming programme.

Deep Time moves beyond a human scale, beyond language, beyond fact. In Scotland’s Far North it can be seen in the geological and the nuclear: the peat bogs of the Flow country and the nuclear site of Dounreay. A consideration of deep time also suggests possible methodologies for practice: excavation, speculation.