Listening as Tending: Decomposing Disco
5 - 6pm, Thursday 12 June
Join us for a shared listening experience of Decomposing Disco, followed by a conversation with artist Merinda Davies and deathworker Emma Beattie. This program is in association with the exhibition We are all eating and being eaten, in Gallery 3. Free, no bookings required.
The Gallery is wheelchair accessible. If you would like to discuss your accessibility requirements please email linsey.gosper@lismore.nsw.gov.au or call 02 6627 4606.
Decomposing Disco is a meditative sound piece that lingers, and unravels, echoing the slow rhythms of decomposition and transformation —composting leaves, shifting soils, body decay—an invitation towards embodied listening that is both collective and intimate.
Decomposition is not only an ending, but a process of becoming. Recognising the human body as part of a wider ecology, susceptible to the same forces of rot, renewal, and return. Our bodies—skin, breath, and bone—are not separate from the world, but deeply entangled in its cycles. In this entanglement, there is grief, but also pleasure: in collapse, in closeness, in the fertile beauty of breakdown.
Following the listening, artist Merinda Davies will be joined in conversation by grief tender and deathworker Emma Beattie. Together, and in conversation they will explore the thresholds between care, loss, pleasure, and transformation—tracing how we might attune ourselves to the often-silenced tempos of deathing and grieving, and how facing death—rather than turning away from it—can become a portal to deeper pleasure, aliveness, and connection with the living world around us.
Emma’s work is rooted in lived experience and shaped by caring, volunteering, and training across the deathcare space since 2020. With origins in strategic storytelling and social impact, she brings a deep listening practice into her offerings of tending, mentoring, and facilitating. Her re/imagining of how we live with death opens space for softness, slowness, and shared presence. This is a space for listening not only with the ears, but with the whole body—a gathering at the edges of decomposition, where sound, conversation, and pleasure become acts of ecological and emotional care.
